


Geist

by Energybeing



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Legion (TV)
Genre: Some Second Person Segments, this is a weird story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2020-08-23 14:33:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 40
Words: 92,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20244412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Energybeing/pseuds/Energybeing
Summary: No matter what the voices in her head said, Buffy knew that she wasn't a vampire hunter. Of course, that didn't mean that she wasn't something else.





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> I own neither Buffy nor Legion. Please don’t sue me for using them. To be clear, that's Legion the television show on FX, not the film of the same name.
> 
> Set during ‘Chapter 1’ of Legion and at no particular point in the Buffy timeline.

It’s beginning to get dark. You suppose that that’s fitting – this is a funeral, after all. Everyone is sad, so it isn’t surprising that the sun has decided to make it just that little bit gloomier.

You aren’t sad, though. Oh, you’d liked Celia, of course – she was your cousin – but while you’re certainly feeling things, _sad_ isn’t one of them.

_Powerless_ is, though. You’d been there when she died. You remember calling for help, yelling, hoping that someone, _anyone_ would come. No one had. You’d been alone, with her, and the great crushing thing that had killed her. You’d saved her so many times before, but that had been make-believe. When it had been real, there’d been nothing you could do.

_Scared_ is another. You don’t like being alone, now. What if the same thing happens to _you_, and there’s no one there to help? You could die screaming and no one would know. Fortunately, your parents seem to feel the same thing. These days, they rarely let you out of their sight.

That’s how you know that they’re a little worried that you haven’t cried yet. They think you should be sad, and you haven’t dared tell them that you’re too busy feeling other things to mourn. You’ve heard them talking, saying that you’re very young, maybe you don’t really know what death is. You hadn’t liked that. You’re eight, and you’re a grown-up now. You have grown-up worries.

When they start lowering the coffin, you look away. You know what it looks like when something heavy weighs you down until you can’t breathe. How much worse would it be to be buried, to feel like that all the time? You’re scared of being alone, but being buried is so much worse.

You see a hand reach out of the soil in the distance. It’s pale, pallid, streaked with dirt. It feels the soil around it as though looking for something. Apparently not finding it, it then _waves_, as though that were a perfectly natural thing for a mostly buried hand to do. It seems so natural, in fact, that you’d probably wave back if it weren’t for the fact that you are at a funeral. Then it retreats below the surface as though it had never been there. You don’t know if it found what it was looking for. You aren’t even sure that you really saw it at all.

Your mom makes a sound like a hiccough next to you, which you suspect was a stifled sob, and you-

“Hey! Hey, you! Buffy!”

Buffy blinked, focusing on the woman in front of her. She had messy short brown hair and big headphones around her neck. “Hi, Lenny. What’s up?”

Lenny poked her. “Where did you go? Sunnydale again? Rome?”

Buffy shook her head. “LA. I was eight. A hand came up out of the ground in a graveyard.”

Lenny grinned widely. “Wild.” 

“Sure, I guess,” Buffy rubbed the back of her neck absently. She wouldn’t describe it as wild. Dissociative episodes like that was why she was in Clockworks, after all. Drifting off and finding yourself in an alternate reality where you hunt vampires was the kind of thing that psychiatric hospitals were for. “Did you want something?”

“Uh huh. This new girl showed up in therapy today. Made quite the upset. Gotta say, I like her spunk.”

Buffy focused on the here and now. “Ooh. What’s the sitch, do you think?”

“Well, she’s not a touchy-feely type, I know that. Kissinger’ll hate her. David likes her though. Asked her to be his girlfriend, right then and there.”

“No!” Buffy said. There weren’t a lot of interesting things to be found at Clockworks, which was why she liked Lenny. The girl could have fun with anything, from someone drooling in their chair to the man who spent all his time hiding in the shrubbery. She couldn’t wait to hear some actual, honest-to-God _gossip_. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard any of that. 

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cordelia said, sniffing. “_I_ tell you things all the time.”

That, of course, was the other reason that she was in Clockworks. She knew Cordelia wasn’t there. She didn’t even exist. But that didn’t mean that the chemicals in her brain or whatever knew it. In fact, despite all the drugs and the therapy, her brain just didn’t seem to get the message.

Buffy listened as Lenny gave her a play-by-play of the first encounter between David and the new girl. She had no doubts that it wasn’t a particularly accurate one, though, so she didn’t focus too hard on what the other woman was saying.

With her ears safely on autopilot and Cordelia ignored (not that that took much effort, she was raptly listening to the gossip herself), Buffy thought about David. Out of all of the people here, he was the one who was most like her. Things _happened_ around him. Things that didn’t really make sense. He had a tendency to be in places that no one really expected him to be, and sometimes he’d know things before being told. Once, she was sure that he’d made a plastic cup move within reach with his mind, but that had just been Lenny bumping into the table while she was dancing.

Things like that happened to Buffy too, sometimes. Or, in a way, they didn’t. Sometimes people told her things. People who weren’t there. She’d fixed a broken chair leg once, despite knowing nothing about carpentry or wood glue or anything like that, because Xander had told her how. Except that Xander didn’t exist. Giles often told her things, some of which even turned out to be true (a large portion of them involved demons, though, which had never been helpful).

Plus there were the things that happened in her dissociative episodes. Not all of them were in the present – some, like the one that she’d just had, happened when she was much younger. While most of them seemed to be focused on her late teens and early twenties, occasionally there were moments from later on, too. Sometimes the things that happened in them happened in real life. Not things like making out with a vampire, of course, but the background events. Things that happened in the bits of the world that weren’t based on vampire hunting.

“That’s them over there,” Lenny said, pointing.

Buffy looked. The new girl, who she had yet to learn the name of (Lenny had referred to her by a series of nicknames such as ‘the girl with guts’) was standing next to David. She was wearing a black jacket which was zipped up to her chin. It was slightly too big for her, so her hands were hidden mostly in her sleeves (“Good way to hide weapons,” Giles told her, “best look out for that.”) She wore a soft floppy hat, which had long blonde hair coming out from underneath it. It was, as Lenny had said, the kind of clothes that someone who wasn’t into touchy-feely stuff would wear.

The most noticeable thing, though, was that they’d each wrapped a single length of fabric around one of their hands, with a length of it dangling in the air between them. Given David’s goofy grin, Buffy supposed that this was the Clockworks equivalent of holding hands.

Seeing them looking, David waved, then looked abashed as he realised that he’d inadvertently waved his girlfriend’s hand too. They walked over.

“Hey, Buffy,” he said, as he moved to flop down in a nearby seat. He paused for a moment, trying to work out the logistics of sitting with a length of fabric attaching you to someone else, but by that point the new girl had already sat down. “This is Syd.”

“Hey Syd,” Buffy said. “I hear you made a ruckus in Kissinger’s group therapy earlier.”

“I never said ‘ruckus’,” Lenny interjected. “I said something about a monumental upset of the status quo, the kind of thing that people will talk about for generations to come. Speaking of – a little birdie told me that’s it’s your birthday, David.”

“Congratulations,” Buffy said. She didn’t wish him a happy birthday – he was here, after all, and Clockworks wasn’t really the place for happiness.

David smiled sheepishly. “Thank you.”

Not wanting to dwell on that any further, as she’d had her own share of birthdays here, Buffy changed the subject. “What _did_ you say to Kissinger, anyway? If everyone’s gonna be talking about it, I don’t want to be left loopless.”

Syd fidgeted with the edge of her sleeve. “Just, you know, that maybe our problems aren’t all in our heads.”

“Oh, I can’t believe it! The human made a good point!” Glory said. “My problems aren’t in my head, they’re in that little worm Ben’s, with his twitching and his breathing and his _humanity_. Good Me, everything is his fault. I, of course, can’t be-”

“If you could not with the ranting, that would be great,” Buffy muttered.

“What?” Syd asked.

“My current problem is a whacko hell god, sitting just over there in a slutty red dress,” Buffy replied. “Given that she hasn’t gone all Valentine’s Day on everyone just because we’re here, I kind of think that she’s in my head.”

Glory nodded. “It is _such_ a mess in there. Honestly, you should see an interior decorator.”

Syd blinked, clearly unsure what to make of that. Buffy couldn’t blame her.

“So I hear there’ll be cherry pie tonight,” David interrupted awkwardly.

“It’s Thursday,” Lenny pointed out. “There’s cherry pie every Thursday. Every single one. No change. No _chocolate_. I miss chocolate, you know, the way it was.”

“It’s not as good as cherry pie.”

“I don’t like cherry pie,” Syd said.

David looked at her as though she’d grown a second head. “How can you not? It’s got everything that you need, like, um, cherries for one and there’s also the crust, and then you can break the crust to find the cherries and-“

“I just don’t like things that taste of cherries.”

As fascinating as the discussion was, Buffy would rather talk about something else. If she didn’t then she was pretty sure that the word ‘cherries’ was going to lose all meaning. If that happened then there might as well be no Thursdays, and if there were no Thursdays – well, that way madness lay. Or more of it, at least. “Sorry to interrupt this incredibly interesting conversation, but, um, Syd? What did you mean when you said that maybe not everything is in our heads?”

David opened his mouth, probably to continue to talk about cherry pie; after all, if they were talking about cherry pie, then they couldn’t be talking about anything difficult. Syd, however, spoke first. “We’re here because we’re different. Not the same. Not _normal_. They think that if we’re here long enough then we’ll end up normal again, but what if we just aren’t the same as them? You know, what if we actually _are_ different? If the difference isn’t just something in our heads?”

Buffy tried to pay attention, she really did. She wanted to hear what Syd was saying – it seemed important, somehow. She heard a few words (different, not normal, normal again), and she felt like she got the gist of it, but she wasn’t _sure_.

The reason that she didn’t hear everything was because Spike had materialised in front of her and was singing at the top of his lungs, the kind of prolonged, absurdly loud singing that was only really possible if you didn’t need to stop for breath. The fact that he had sprouted fangs didn’t seem to impede him at all, and the malicious glint in his yellow eyes told her that he knew _exactly_ what he was doing. 

“_Oh, don’t deceive me…_”

David, who obviously hadn’t wanted to have this conversation, looked from Buffy to Syd and back again. When Buffy didn’t immediately respond (she was trying every technique she knew to get Spike to _shut up_, short of yelling at him, which never worked anyway), he stood up. “Come on, Syd. I’ll show you the dining room. See if I can convince you that cherries aren’t all bad.” 

Syd looked back at Buffy, who had by that point clamped her hands over her ears. Seeing that she was clearly not paying any attention to them at all, she waved goodbye to Lenny and got up to follow David.

At that point, Spike stuck his foot out. It was the kind of thing that people did to trip people over, but it shouldn’t have done anything, it _couldn’t_, he wasn’t there – but nevertheless Syd stumbled. She tried to balance herself, but one hand was tied to David and she couldn’t quite manage it. She fell.

David tried to catch her, to pull her up, but one hand was full of fabric and besides, he’d been facing the wrong way. Still, he reached out and grabbed her, but her too-big sleeves had ridden up and he caught her by the arm.

There was a sound like thunder and breaking things, and the ground below Buffy cracked, opening wide like some kind of terrible maw with teeth of jagged rock, devouring the room from below. She was falling, falling, and above her all she could see was Spike looking down at her, yellow eyes glittering. The last thing she heard, louder even than the cracking ground and the crumbling walls, was his voice. 

“_Oh, never leave me…”_


	2. Chapter Two

It’s dark.

You don’t notice that, at first. The first thing you’re aware of is that you _hurt_. You feel as though you’ve fallen off a building, but that’s nothing compared to the fact that your bones feel like molten metal scorching you from within. Your skin feels as though it is crumbling away, as though the fire inside you is so hot that you are disintegrating. That’s the first thing that you feel. You feel that before you are even realise that it’s you who’s feeling it. For an eternal moment, all you are is pain.

The moment passes, and you take a breath. The air is stale, stagnant, and it tastes like dirt. You take another, trying to calm yourself, but breathing is more difficult than it should be. As though there isn’t much air.

_Then_ you realise that it’s dark, and you suddenly grasp why it’s dark and the air smells of soil. You reach out tentatively, hoping that you are wrong, but you aren’t. You’re familiar enough with coffins to know one when you’re in one. Your stomach is a ball of roiling terror – you’re buried alive. You scratch and scrabble at the lid like a cornered animal, and you aren’t thinking. Not really. The only thing running through your mind is a single word, repeated over and over again.

_No._

You can’t be here. You _can’t_. Everything had been… better, better than this, and now you are here. The darkness is tangible, almost solid. You can feel it trickling down your throat, clogging your nostrils. Soon you won’t be able to breathe. You’re going to drown in shadows.

But you’re the Slayer. You aren’t going to die. Not here. Not like this. _Not like this._

Coffins aren’t built to stop something breaking out of them, and besides, you’re strong. The lid is nothing to you.

Dirt falls on you, getting in your eyes, your ears, your mouth. But that is nothing compared to the suffocating darkness of a moment before, and you claw your way to the surface, sweeping dirt behind you-

Buffy sat up, and the world span around her. Not that she had any reference point for that, of course, because she couldn’t see a thing. The only things that she knew was that her head hurt, and that there was a writhing pit of nausea in her stomach. She’d hit her head.

She reached up to touch it tentatively. She winced at the contact, and her hand came away covered in something sticky. Okay then. So she was hurt, and it was dark, and she was bleeding. She took a deep breath to calm herself. The air was thick and still, but it also smelled strongly of something sweet. Cherries, she realised after a moment. She must have hit her head harder than she’d thought. 

She levered herself upwards, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the floor seemed to be slightly curved and covered in the same sticky substance as her hair. She must have bled a _lot_. She knew that she should be worried about that, but she couldn’t quite seem to manage it. Shock, she supposed.

She felt her way around. The room was small, the walls were curved. She didn’t think that she could be in Clockworks – which made sense, given that the last thing she remembered was the building collapsing around her as she fell. The weirdest thing, though, was that the walls were still covered in that same sticky stuff. She couldn’t have bled that much, she was sure. She would know. She was sure of that. Almost.

She brought her hand to her face and sniffed it. She knew blood when she smelled it, and this wasn’t it. It smelt like cherry.

“Am I inside a giant cherry?” Buffy said aloud. 

“Just think what Freud would say,” a voice replied jovially.

Buffy turned to see Willow sitting cross-legged in mid-air. Her hair was long, white, and swept back in a messy ponytail. She was faintly luminescent – not enough to see the room by, but enough that Buffy could clearly see her. “Why would Freud say anything?”

“Oh, you know. Stuck inside a giant cherry in the dark, underground.”

Buffy frowned. “Nope. Not getting it.”

“You know, you really should’ve paid more attention to Professor Walsh’s classes. This is _literally_ Psych 101.”

“I never met Walsh,” Buffy said. “I never met you, either. You’re just in my head.”

“That’s no reason not to do your classwork.”

“Kind of is.”

“Fine,” Willow pouted, “be that way. I _was_ going to help you out, but if you’re going to treat me like I’m not even here then I might as well go.”

“You _aren’t_ here.”

Willow vanished with an audible pop. Buffy sighed. Talking to people who weren’t there went against years of therapy, but on the other hand she’d hit her head (she couldn’t think of any other explanation for being in a giant cherry), and she could use the company. “Come back, Will. If I’m going to be stuck in a giant cherry I might as well do it with a friend.”

There was a rush of air as Willow reappeared. It reminded Buffy that not only was she in a cherry, but she also seemed to be buried. Soon there wouldn’t be any air at all. Willow smiled at her. “Seeing as you asked so nicely.”

“Don’t suppose you know a way out of here?” Buffy asked. She didn’t have much hope. Stupendously powerful witch Willow might be, but she also wasn’t _there_. Magic was all very well and good, but it didn’t exist.

She ignored the idea that it was the only reasonable explanation for her current situation.

To her surprise, Willow nodded. “Of course! Why do you think I’m here?”

“To make really bad jokes about Freud?”

“No! Well, maybe a little bit,” Willow said sheepishly. “Mainly I’m here to remind you about what you said when we decided to call all the Slayers. Do you remember?”

Buffy shook her head. “Not really. I didn’t really like myself at that point, so I try not to think about that whole time period.”

“You know, ready to be strong, yada yada? You gave a whole speech. Very inspiring.”

“Oh yeah, that. What about it?”

Willow drifted forward. “Well, _are_ you ready to be strong?”

Buffy shrugged. “Not really. Honestly I feel sick and kind of woozy.”

“Work with me a little here, will you?”

“Fine,” Buffy said, “sure. I’m ready to be strong.”

“Good,” Willow replied. “You’re going to need to be.” Then she reached out and touched Buffy on the forehead.

It didn’t feel like anything. That’s not to say that Buffy felt nothing – it felt like someone touching scar tissue. There was a sense of pressure, but nothing else. In short, it felt like being touched by someone who wasn’t there. 

Buffy felt as though all warmth left her body in an instant. Her arms felt heavy, her legs buckled. Her breath steamed in the still air. She felt _tired_, more tired than she had ever felt. Her head was a throbbing mess which felt like it was going to burst, which was fine, because if it burst then she could rest, she could _sleep_-

She almost missed the cracking sound as the wall next to her ruptured. Almost. But not quite. 

As it was, she saw the hands reach through it. They were small, and bloody. Buffy was no expert, but she was sure that several fingers were broken. Nothing could bend like that and be whole. 

But then nothing could break through a stone wall like it was made out of paper, either. Even if the wall was covered in crushed cherries.

Or nothing human anyway.

Something tumbled through the gap. It _was_ human - or rather, it had been. One arm was clearly dislocated, and there was an actual _dent_ in its head, which was covered in matted blood. The back was also clearly snapped, leaving the thing a twisted heap of broken pieces. 

None of that seemed to bother it much. It moved in jerky, uncoordinated movements, like something being moved by a puppeteer who didn’t really know what they were doing. It stood straight, more or less, its back singing a chorus of pops and grating bones. It grinned at Buffy, baring bloody teeth in a smile that was disconcertingly cheerful.

Buffy recognised the smile. She recognised the eyes – or rather _eye_, given that one of them was a ruined mess. She recognised the hair, matted and dirty as it was.

“Lenny?”

Lenny _bowed_, her wrecked arm sweeping across the floor. It _was_ Lenny, even though she was definitely, indisputably dead. 

Buffy was confused. This had nothing to do with her being strong. This thing, the thing that had been Lenny, _that_ was strong. But it had nothing to do with her. It was a zombie, or something like it. If this was magic, it was crude and dark. Not like Willow at all. Or at least, not like the Willow with the white hair. 

The Willow who wasn’t around anymore, either.

Buffy looked back at Lenny, who was grinning at her expectantly. Obviously she was waiting for something. 

Buffy sighed. She had no idea what was going on. She didn’t even know if anything _was_ going on. For all she knew, this might be going on inside her head. She supposed that she might as well go with it. It wasn’t as though she had anything else to do. “Okay then. I guess we’d better get out of here.”

Without a word, the thing that had been Lenny reached up and began tearing through the stone as though it was wet clay, shunting it aside effortlessly despite being obviously broken. It left a tunnel behind her – small, cramped, but still big enough for Buffy to climb through. So Buffy followed, and thought that anyone up there was about to see something much, much worse than a hand reaching out from a grave and waving.

Buffy knew the instant that she breached the surface. She could tell because a light seemed to be shining right in her face. She blinked and covered her eyes, blinded by a sudden rush of tears. As she did so, she staggered backwards, letting loose a cascade of rubble. She froze instinctively, but nothing happened. She wasn’t buried in an avalanche of detritus. After taking a few moments to adjust, she opened her eyes and looked around.

Clockworks was gone. Oh, there were a few walls here and there that were more or less intact, but they were few and far between. The place looked like it had been hit by an earthquake – which, Buffy rationalised, is what must’ve happened. It was dark, but someone had set up gigantic lights all over the area so that the rubble was lit as clearly as if it was daylight.

In the light, Buffy saw two things.

The first was that there was a complete absence of Lenny. It wasn’t just that she wasn’t there – there was no sign that she had been there. There were no tracks leading off somewhere else. There wasn’t even a corpse. If it wasn’t for the tunnel, Buffy wouldn’t have known that she had ever been there at all.

The second was a man. He was wearing some kind of military uniform, and was leaning against one of the lights just a few feet away from her, and he had a gun in his hands. He was also looking directly at Buffy.

Buffy flinched automatically, but the man didn’t react at all, didn’t even blink. Buffy paused and waved a hand in front of her, but he still didn’t move. It wasn’t that he didn’t see her – it seemed more like _he_ he wasn’t there. His body was there, but his mind was somewhere else.

Buffy crept towards him slowly. She knew how these things went. If there were people with guns around, and you had a chance to take one, then that’s what you did. Well, in her experience, it was actually usually people with swords, but the same principle applied.

(It probably didn’t, in the real world, but she was going to do it anyway.)

She was about halfway there when she heard a voice behind her. “Hey! I’ve got one!”


	3. Chapter Three

There are two things that you don’t like about being a Slayer.

Actually, no. That’s not true. There are lots of things you don’t like. There’s the fact that it kills your love life, usually literally. There’s the universal law which states that whenever you buy some cute clothes, you _will_ get them covered in demon goop. There’s also the whole thing about being the only line of defence against things that go bump in the night, which is never fun.

But those are things that every Slayer hates. The things that you hate, as The Leader, are a little different.

Neither of them, technically, are to do with demons or witches or even Slayers. It’s the Slayer families that you hate. 

The first thing that you hate is telling a family that their daughter, girlfriend, wife, mother, has died. There had been a time when it had been _you_ telling them that, every single time, because if someone died then it was _your_ fault – after all, you’re the one in charge. If you make a bad call, or you’re too slow, or too weak, then it’s your fault. You’re the one that they should blame, and you make sure that they know that. Usually, they do. They rant and rail and scream and cry. You hate every second of it, but that’s not the worst of it. Worse still is when you tell them what happened, how you were _stupid_ and you got their loved one killed, and they hug you and hold you and tell you it isn’t your fault. Some demon did it. There was nothing you could do. That makes you hate yourself more than anything, because there’s always something that could have been done. How dare they forgive you? You can’t.

These days, though, it isn’t always you who has to tell the families. You’ve gotten too big - there are Slayers out there that you’ve never even met. So the people who did know them give them the news instead. You know this shouldn’t make you feel relieved, but it does.

Even so, that’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is finding a new Slayer, and telling the family. Usually, they’re relieved. Now they know why their mother, wife, girlfriend, daughter is terrifyingly strong, why she has dreams of people dying, why she barely ever sleeps. There’s a reason. They’ve been _chosen_. You don’t tell them about some old dudes who decided to stick a force of primordial darkness inside a young girl so they could save their own skins. They’ll find that out later, probably, but for now its best if they think that they’re one of the girls in all the world, chosen to fight the forces of darkness.

Then there’s the dread when the family realises what that means. Demons are real, vampires are real, magic is real, and almost all of that wants you dead. You and the rest of the world with you. Sooner or later, they know that you or someone like you will come knocking, and tell them that you were stupid and you got their loved ones killed. Their lives go on pause as they wait for that day. They were a family - now they're a ticking time bomb.

That’s what you think of, when one of the people tasked with finding a new Slayer comes up to you and tells you they’ve found one. You think about how you’re the person who’s just dropped into their lives and torn it apart. That’s all you-

Buffy blinked. It wasn’t the time for that. Not when there were people with guns around. Not when there was danger.

Not that that had ever made a difference. There was a reason that Buffy didn’t drive. 

She turned around. 

The person who’d spoken wasn’t military, or at least didn’t look like it. He was wearing a flat cap and three-piece suit, and though he was armed, it was with a large, old-fashioned gun which didn’t look anything like the rifle that Buffy had been about to steal. 

The most important thing, though, was that the gun wasn’t pointed at her. That was something of a surprise, given that Buffy was covered in dirt and blood and there was a seemingly incapacitated soldier a few feet from where she was. If she’d been him, she would definitely have the gun aimed at her. She’d probably have fired it, in fact, and not even bothered to say anything to give her position away.

Buffy frowned. That was a good point, actually. She looked like something out of a horror film, and this guy didn’t even have the courtesy to point a gun at her. Obviously something was going on, and she had no idea what it was. “Who are you?” 

It seemed like a good place to start. Buffy hadn’t actually expect an answer. “Ptonomy,” the man replied. “This your work?”

“Is what my work?”

He gestured eloquently at the ruins of Clockworks. “All this.”

“Are you seriously asking me if I caused an earthquake?”

Ptonomy looked at her shrewdly. “Is that what this is?”

“What else could it be?”

He shrugged. “Generally earthquakes don’t limit themselves to a single building. Plus there’s everything else.”

“What else?”

He tilted his head. “So this _wasn’t_ you?”

“I _told_ you,” Buffy said exasperatedly “I can’t make earthquakes. Or whatever it is that you think this is. I don’t know what’s going on, who you are – is Ptonomy your name, or your organisation, or-”

He smiled at her. “My name. Ptonomy Wallace.”

Buffy took a deep, shaky breath. “Okay then. Ptonomy, I’m going to ask you a question. I’d love it if you could answer.”

“Shoot,” he said. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

“_What is going on?_”

“Ah. One of the big ones.” He focused on something going on behind Buffy. “You want to handle that one?”

Buffy turned around again. She began to feel as though there was going to be something creeping up behind her no matter which way she was looking. Sadly, that was something she was used to feeling. It was just that she was normally a Slayer when she felt it. Not an ordinary if mentally unstable human.

When Buffy turned around, she was almost certain that she was hallucinating. For one thing, she saw a young Native American woman, probably in her late teens. For another, she had a sword strapped to her back, an honest-to-God _sword_. For a third, everything about her just screamed _Slayer_, from the way she held herself to the way she moved.

Buffy didn’t recognise her, but that wasn’t terribly unusual. Buffy the vampire Slayer had years and years of experiences, and Buffy didn’t remember all of them. Sometimes she hallucinated people and had no idea who they were, and she had to wait for them to tell her.

For a moment, Buffy looked around, trying to find the person that Ptonomy was talking to (she ignored the idea that he might be a hallucination too), before the young woman gently prodded the catatonic soldier, making him topple sideways. His didn’t seem to notice. If it wasn’t for the fact that Buffy could see him breathing, she would have thought that he was dead.

“Don’t play with the soldiers, Kerry,” Ptonomy said tiredly. Buffy got the distinct impression that that wasn’t the first time that he’d had to say that.

Kerry straightened. “Sorry.” Buffy didn’t believe that for a second. Kerry nodded at Buffy. “This the one?”

“Sure looks that way,” Ptonomy replied neutrally.

Kerry looked at Buffy, sizing her up. Buffy had/hadn’t done that enough to know what it looked like. Then she smiled in a way that was obviously intended to be comforting, but just looked strained instead. “You’re a mutant.”

Ptonomy gave an amused snort from behind her. 

“I… _what?_”

“Mutant,” Kerry said, as though it explained everything. “You have a gift. We’ll teach you to hone your gift so you, uh, aren’t a walking weapon of mass destruction who makes giant cherries underground.”

Buffy stared at her for a long moment before turning back to Ptonomy. “You want to translate?”

She ignored Wesley, young, clean shaven, suited and an utter dork, who rolled his eyes and said “One girl in all the world… get with the program. What _has_ Rupert been teaching you?”

Ptonomy paused to compose his thoughts. “You know how people can have, hmm, something wrong with their genes? Something like Huntington’s or sickle cell anaemia, problems caused by an abnormality at the genetic level. Well, sometimes people’s genes let them do… something different.”

“Like collapse buildings with a thought,” Kerry supplied helpfully.

“Yes, like that,” Ptonomy agreed. 

“You’re talking about magic,” Buffy said. She felt ill. Magic didn’t exist. Couldn’t exist. She had spent years and years trying to believe that, taking drugs and talking to therapists until she’d gotten to the point where she believed it. At least some of the time. And now these people were saying that she had a gift – oh sure, they were spouting science talk as well, but then they’d said that Tara was magical because she was half demon. This was the kind of thing that people did with things that they didn’t really understand. 

“No, no, it’s not-“ Kerry started, but Ptonomy held up a hand.

“Sure. It’s magic. If that’s what works for you. Kerry and I can do things. These people, the soldiers, they don’t like people like us. They think that because we do things that most people can’t, we aren’t really human. We’re different, so we can’t be human.” He bared his teeth in something that would probably have been a smile if it hadn’t been quite so bitter. In the harsh glare of the lights, his teeth looked very white against his dark skin. “I’m sure you know that story.”

Buffy flushed and looked away. “You… you think that the thing that I can do is… what? Destroy buildings?” She didn’t mention anything about the cherries, because that seemed a little too wacky even for magic. She also didn’t mention being rescued by Lenny’s broken corpse, because that seemed like it would raise a lot of questions and, given that the corpse wasn’t around, Buffy didn’t think that she could answer them.

“Someone did,” Ptonomy answered simply. “There was no sign of explosives. No earthquake. Nothing. The earth just opened up and the building fell down. To us, that sort of indicates that a person did it. Division Three – the soldiers – obviously think so too.”

Buffy scratched her head. To her extreme mortification, this dislodged a lump of mud. “Okay then. Okay. Right. And you said something about cherries? Please tell me you said something about cherries. Because weapon of mass destruction, sure, death is my gift, whatever – but _cherries?_”

Ptonomy nodded. “So far, Division Three has recovered almost two dozen bodies. Every one of them was found inside an enormous cherry.”

“Seriously cherries?” Buffy shook her head. “Freud would have a field day.”

Ptonomy snorted in laughter. Kerry made a confused noise. Wesley shook his head and began admonishing her for levity in a dangerous situation. Buffy silently thanked Willow.

“Cherries,” Ptonomy confirmed solemnly after a moment, only his eyes giving away his mirth. “Has anything like this happened to you before?”

“I can honestly say no to that one. I’d be really surprised if _anyone_ had been through this before.”

“Normally mu- people with magic make stuff happen around them. Sometimes without meaning to. Have you ever, I don’t know-“

“Oh, sure. Tonnes of times. But only in my delusions where I hunt vampires and demons.” Buffy shrugged. “I live in a… _lived_ in a psychiatric hospital. Crazy stuff is the norm. Just, generally, it’s me that the…” Buffy trailed off.

“Yes?”

“David.”

“Haller?”

Buffy blinked. “How did you know his name?”

“I know the names of everyone who lived and worked at Clockworks. What about David?”

“Things… _happened_ when David was around. Like, he’d be places that he shouldn’t be. Know things. I swear he moved something with his mind once, but that was just-“

“Did they find David’s body?” Kerry interrupted. 

Ptonomy shook his head. “Not yet.”

Buffy stumbled a little bit over the idea that David might be magical. Or a mutant or whatever. Then something that Ptonomy had said caught her attention. “Wait. Hold on a second. What do you mean, not yet?”

Ptonomy rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. “Clockworks collapsed two days ago.”

“And if you’ve survived buried underground for two days, then we’re pretty sure you’re a mutant,” Kerry added blithely.

“No. No no no. That doesn’t make sense. I was down there, what, ten minutes? Sure, maybe I was unconscious for a bit, but… two days? No, no no. You’re wrong.”

But then Buffy thought about how long it would take to set up the lights, to dig up nearly two dozen bodies, to identify them…

Two days in the dark. Buried. She should be dead.

She looked up at Ptonomy, so sure and certain, and thought about how Kerry had seemed to think that telling Buffy she was a mutant would be a relief. It wasn’t. She knew what it was like to tell someone that they were a part of something, and that people would hunt you because of it. She wasn’t dead, but she might as well be.

“I did say you’ll need to be strong,” Willow whispered gently in her ear.


	4. Chapter Four

You’ve just ripped the door off one of the cupboards in your kitchen. You hadn’t meant to – it’s always been a little bit stiff, and you’re used to having to pull it pretty hard in order to open it. What you _aren’t_ used to, though, is being much, much stronger than you should be. You'd pulled it rather harder than you had planned.

This isn’t the first accident that you’ve had. You’ve accidently ruined three door handles. You broke the lock on the bathroom door – you hadn’t even realised that it had _been_ locked in the first place. It had taken Dawn screaming for you to figure it out. Yesterday, you pulled one of your drawers clean out, and only your absurdly fast reflexes had kept it from slamming into the wall behind you. And that was just some of the things that had happened around the house. It had been just as bad in school.

Your dad is beginning to get annoyed by all of this. At first it had been funny. There had been jokes about moving house before it fell apart – surely if _Buffy_, of all people, was breaking things left, right and centre, then it was one step away from complete disintegration. But around the time of the bathroom door there had been an edge to the jokes. When he talked about moving, your dad didn’t smile and your mom just looked sad.

Of course, now you _know_ why you keep breaking things. The house isn’t going to collapse, like Dad thought. You aren’t some freak of nature, which is what _you_ had thought.

Well, maybe that last bit isn’t strictly true. You _aren’t_ natural – no one gifted with the strength, speed and skills to hunt vampires is. 

Dad begins making disgruntled noises – you’ve ruined his breakfast, he’s going to have to call someone to get it fixed, honestly, is this house even worth it? Mom flutters around anxiously. Dawn reaches past you for the cereal which would have been your breakfast, if it wasn’t for the fact that you’ve just lost your appetite. She doesn’t miss the opportunity to make a snide comment about you ruining things as she does so.

You nod, which seems to surprise Dawn. You do ruin things. Being a Slayer does tend to put a damper on things, and you’ve only known about that for a few hours. You haven’t even gone hunting yet. 

You haven’t even told them what you are yet. You don’t know how you can – you just know that you have to. Things are falling apart, you can feel that, and Dawn can feel it too – she blames you, you know that. She just said as much.

But you won’t tell them yet. It’s a school day. Now isn’t the time. You can afford to wait. You-

“-haven’t heard a word I said, have you?”

Buffy frowned. “Sorry, what did you say?”

Ptonomy looked annoyed that she wasn’t listening. Buffy got the impression that he would have crossed his arms in irritation if it weren’t for the gun that he was holding. Even so, Buffy thought that there was something else as well. Concern, she suspected. After all, she was covered in blood, mud, and cherry. 

“He was asking if you knew anything about wh-“

Ptonomy interrupted Kerry. “We’ve got a boat nearby. Do you want to come with us?”

“What?” Buffy asked.

“We’re here to catch whoever did this,” Kerry added. “We chase them, then we catch them. We don’t just pick up the nearest person and call it a day.”

“Kerry, if it was David who did this, then he’s probably long gone. It’s been two days. If he _is_ buried somewhere around here, chances are he’s as dead as everyone else. Everyone else died in the building collapse, or suffocated inside the cherries. We’ve got a lead, now, but more importantly we’ve got someone who _didn’t_ die in the fall and _didn’t_ suffocate.”

Kerry sighed. “Fine. Whatever. But we’ll head out again as soon as we drop her off.”

Ptonomy smiled briefly. “Sure.”

“Hold on a second,” Buffy said, “why do you think that I’d _want_ to come with you? I don’t even really know who you people are.”

“For one thing, once we leave the soldiers will wake up-”

“-they’ll take you in for interrogation-”

“-for another you’ve got a nasty head wound-“

“-no one likes a mutant with a headache-“

“-but, most importantly, we’ve got showers,” Ptonomy finished with a grin.

Buffy looked down at herself, and then promptly wished that she hadn’t. Not just because it made her head spin. She looked like – well, she looked like she’d just come out of an exploding cherry factory. She didn’t have any money on her, and looking like she did she wouldn’t be able to get very far even if she did avoid the soldiers. “You might have a point there.”

The words were barely out of her mouth before Kerry was moving past her. Despite the rocky, unstable terrain and the fact that having a sword strapped to your back couldn’t be good for your balance, she moved as easily as though she were simply walking down the street. Ptonomy waited for Buffy.

They walked in silence for a few minutes. Buffy was quiet largely because she wasn’t a Slayer and therefore couldn’t effortlessly pick a way through the rubble, especially not with her head feeling like there was a small grenade going off inside of it. She also didn’t say anything because she didn’t have anything to say. 

She had spent years trying to deal with the fact that she didn’t have superpowers, that she didn’t have friends with superpowers, that there were no such things as demons or vampires or witches. Technically all of that was still true, but mutants with strange genes that gave them superpowers was almost as bad. She didn’t have anything to say because what _could_ you say, when you were presented with something like that?

But, after a little while, Buffy realised that she couldn’t just say nothing. There were things she needed to know. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course,” Ptonomy replied. “I suspect you probably have a few.”

“Mmm. I just wanted to know – you said the soldiers would wake up when we left.”

“Ah. You want to know what happened to them?”

Buffy paused. She didn’t _want_ to know. She really, really didn’t. The answer was, without a shadow of a doubt, going to be something that she didn’t want to hear. She didn’t want to know about superpowers or mutants or anything like that. But it seemed like she _needed_ to know, and anyway, it wasn’t like she wasn’t familiar with knowing things that she didn’t want to. “Yeah.”

“I… remember everything. Every second. Every moment. Every little thing, flawlessly. _Everything_. You understand? I even remember being born. I can, if I touch someone, look through their memories. I can see what their past is, or at least the subjective thing that they think of as the past. I can make people sleep, and remember. That soldier, the one you were moving towards? He was remembering his first kiss with his high school girlfriend. He was there, in that moment – or, rather, in his memory of that moment.”

Buffy digested that for a few moments. “I’m sorry.”

Ptonomy blinked in surprise. “Why?”

“I know what that’s like. A little. Sort of, maybe. To remember things that are… _difficult_. To be there, in that moment, as though it was fresh and current,” Buffy shrugged sheepishly, “I mean, the thing that happens to me isn’t quite the same but… well, yeah, you know.”

“What – can I ask, what is the thing that happens to you?” Ptonomy said, in a carefully neutral tone.

“Well, um, you know that Clockworks is - _was_ a psychiatric hospital, right? The reason that I was there was… I have these moments, when I remember not being me. Well, I am me, but not this me. I’m me, but if I lived in a world of magic and demons and stuff, and I was a girl with superpowers who fights vampires. If you remember – of course you do – earlier, when I wasn’t listening to what you said? I wasn’t here. I was a fifteen year old girl, who’d just torn the door off of a cupboard. My family was upset, and I was thinking about… anyway. I was there. I was _then_.”

“Hmm.”

Buffy waited for a few moments, to see if he would say more. She waited a few more moments, just to make sure. He still didn’t speak. “Uh, could you, you know, _say_ something? Like, could you say ‘Hey, Buffy, don’t worry, we deal with that sort of stuff all the time’?”

“You didn’t tell me your name before.”

“What?”

“I didn’t know your name was Buffy. So no, I couldn’t say that.”

“Right. Okay. And if we can not do the whole point missing thing, that would be _so_ great.”

“Honestly? I have no idea what to do with what you just told me. I’m not an expert on these things. At a guess, I’d say you were some kind of psychic. Things can get pretty rough if you have psychic powers and don’t know it. Wouldn’t surprise me if that’s your brain coping with the stress.”

“Uh huh. That’s great. I’ll call home and tell Mom that I’m only crazy because I’m, oh, Mystic Meg, and once I get a handle on that I’ll be fine and dandy and ready to join the circus. That won’t get me committed. Again.”

“You should really talk to Cary,” Ptonomy said in a placating tone.

“What, little miss Slayer? Pretty sure that isn’t going to help.”

“What? Oh, you mean Kerry?”

Buffy looked at him. “Uh, yeah? You did say Kerry, right?”

“Kerry is… difficult to explain. You might want to wait until we get back.”

“Speaking of that – where are we going, exactly?”

“Place called Summerland. It was set up, oh, decades ago as a safe place for mutants. People won’t look for us there. We’ve got people there who can help you find out what you can do.”

“Right,” Buffy said doubtfully.

“Honestly!” Ptonomy reassured her. “You aren’t the first mutant we’ve helped.”

“Bet I’m the first to have been buried in a cherry for two days though, huh?”

“Yes, that _is_ new.”

At that point, Buffy stumbled as a stone shifted beneath her feet. She would have fallen, but Ptonomy caught her almost before she had even begun falling. It wasn’t the neatest of saves – the butt of his gun somehow managed to catch her under the chin, which sent white flashes dancing across her eyes as her head re-exploded – but she didn’t fall.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Buffy muttered, trying very hard to keep her head still. She was sure that moving it would probably kill her. As a result, it took her a few moments to realise that it hadn’t been Ptonomy who’d spoken.

Giles peered at her, looking far more concerned than anyone who didn’t exist had any right to. “I’ve had my fair share of head injuries, Buffy. Seems like you’ve got a concussion. You need to rest.”

Buffy glared at him as balefully as she could. She suspected that she was about as threatening as a kitten.

She dimly heard Ptonomy speak. “The boat’s about a minute’s walk from here. Do you feel up to it?”

Buffy did _not_ turn to look at him (movement of the head would lead to death), but she said “Yes.” She sounded far more certain than she felt, and she didn’t sound very certain.

“Given that we’re going on a boat,” Giles said, “it’s probably safe to assume that there’ll be some water nearby. There are numerous spells to summon spirits of the water to heal or protect. Some are said to be able to make boats travel faster, too. I’ve never cast any of them myself, but I know the forms. If you want, I can always cast one for you?”

Buffy grunted. It wasn’t a yes or a no, just a grunt. Her head hurt, and she didn’t want to think, let alone talk to someone who didn’t exist about things that existed even less than he did. 

Nevertheless, Giles seemed to take it as a yes. He began chanting under his breath, his hands moving in complex, fluid patterns. It looked like he’d braid his fingers together at any moment. Buffy caught a handful of words, none of which she understood – Anahita, Njord, undine.

Giles finished chanting just as they reached the boat. It was a much larger boat than Buffy had expected – if it had had any sails, she probably would have called it a yacht. It might in fact _be_ a yacht. She wasn’t an expert in these things.

The spell, to no one’s surprise (except possibly Giles, which, Buffy reflected, was still no one), did absolutely nothing. Giles looked at her ruefully, and then vanished.

Kerry, who had reached the boat some time ago and seemed to have been doing some nautical things to it to make it ready to do boat things, jumped down from the deck and then helped the pair up. Buffy was in too much pain to resent her for having Slayer powers when all she had was a throbbing headache. 

Ptonomy settled her in a cabin before heading back onto deck in order to do, presumably, some more nautical things. Buffy closed her eyes, and tried to not to hate the boat’s engine thrumming beneath her too much. She wasn’t terribly successful at that. She was even less successful when the boat actually started moving. She’d never been on a boat before, and she was already beginning to feel seasick.

However, when the boat sped up so drastically that she was flattened against the wall, and the whole boat began juddering as though it was about to break apart at any second, Buffy stopped being angry and started being terrified.

Then the boat _did_ break apart, and she wasn’t even that. That was the point where she lost the capacity for thought. There was only the waves and the great crack of the ship tearing apart, the stuttering of the dying engine, the calls from Ptonomy and Kerry, and then there was the endless weight of the water bearing down on her.


	5. Chapter Five

You love her.

It shouldn’t surprise you, really, but it does. Though she’s frustrating and wayward and not at all like any of the Slayers that you’ve studied, you still love her.

That’s what makes this difficult. You love her – you love her too much, and not enough. You look at her as she stares at the crystal, hypnotised. The syringe dangles loosely from your hand. You can imagine what your father would say if he could see you now – though you don’t _have_ to imagine what Quentin would say, because you _know_. He’s said it already.

Buffy’s powers have already begun to wane, and she’s started to notice. At the moment she just thinks that she’s a little off, like maybe she’s coming down with a cold or something. But with each injection, her powers will fade just a little bit more.

If you loved her less, all of this would be done by now. You wouldn’t have had to worry about Quentin’s threats. The Cruciamentum would already be over, for better or for worse, and you – well, you would have already sent her off to what’s probably going to be her death.

If you loved her more, then you wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing now. You wouldn’t be putting a needle in her, filling her blood with drugs and herbs and just a dash of magic. You wouldn’t care about anything that the Council could do to you, because she’d be safe. 

But you do care. You know that you can be deported in a heartbeat, and that’s only if the Council decides to follow legal channels. You can’t leave Buffy alone, not now. Not ever, if you have your way. You tell yourself that she needs you, which is true – but you need her too. If you’re gone, then there would be no one to take care of her, and she’d have to do this anyway. Just without you. That doesn’t bear thinking about.

You look at her for a moment longer, then put away the syringe before you wake her. You hope that she can forgive you for this. You wish that she could know what you think, what you _feel_, because if she could then everything would be okay, and you-

Buffy opened her eyes. It took her a moment to remember that she was underwater. She could feel the salt in her eyes. It didn’t sting, which would have surprised her, if she was capable of surprise. It just felt like pressure on her eyelids. It wasn’t noticeably different from the feeling of the water surrounding her. There was pressure all around her. She felt as though she was going to be crushed. Her head was going to burst, and her chest was going to implode, and there was just no way that she would be able to swim up to the light glimmering so far above her. There was too much pressure for her to even think about it. All she could do was drift down into the depths and wait for the moment that she broke apart.

She breathed out. She didn’t intend to do it. She didn’t really intend anything – she didn’t really feel capable of thought. Her head was too full, stuffed with saltwater and pain and a few other things besides.

No rush of air escaped her tortured lungs. No bubbles made a wild dash for the surface. 

Instead, a deep, inky black oily substance leaked from her mouth. It just kept flowing and flowing. Even in the darkness, she could see it trailing away from her, a ribbon of shadow snaking away as it followed the current. It kept pouring out of her – if she _had_ been breathing out normally and actual air had been leaving her, then she would have emptied her lungs several times over.

And then it stopped, and the stuff was washed away, and she could think again. She knew that if she didn’t get to the surface soon then she would drown, and she wasn’t going to do that, not now. Not after everything that she’d been through. Besides, she’d been quite the swimmer when she was younger. It was part of her training – you never knew what might crop up in the line of duty.

So Buffy began swimming powerfully upwards. She let loose a steady stream of bubbles from her mouth as she swam – she remembered that being important, so that carbon dioxide wouldn’t build up, or something like that. She wasn’t really sure, but she did it anyway.

She noticed that the bubbles seemed to form into tiny hands which helped drag her to the surface, but she was _sure_ that she was just imagining that. She’d never seen any bubble-handed things in her alternate life as a Slayer, she was pretty sure, so she had to be imagining them. It was probably just a trick of the light, or something.

Never mind the fact that there wasn’t much light to begin with.

It wasn’t long before she reached the surface. She took a deep breath.

There wasn’t much boat left. There were a few fragments here and there, but even all together they wouldn’t come close to being a whole boat. She hadn’t seen any boat bits when she was underwater, either. Not that she had really been in any condition to see much in the first place. Plus there had been that whole inky cloud thing…

Anyway, she couldn’t see Kerry. She could see Ptonomy, though. He was floating a little way away from her.

Face down.

Buffy swam over to him, and tried not to think about what would happen if he was unconscious, if he was… or if she couldn’t get him to shore. She was a good swimmer, she’d trained to be a good swimmer, but she was small and the waves were big. She wasn’t a Slayer. She might not have the strength to do what needed to be done.

With some difficulty, she turned him over. He didn’t seem to be hurt, as far as she could tell. Admittedly, the only thing she was sure of was that there was no blood in the water. That didn’t mean that there wasn’t some kind of injury that she couldn’t see, though. She wasn’t sure how to check if he was breathing, not out here in the water. She couldn’t remember. She knew it was something that she had known, but it was fuzzy, distant. She supposed it was the pressure of the situation. After all, this was the first time that something like this had happened to her.

As it turned out, though, Buffy needn’t have worried. Moments after she got Ptonomy’s face out of the water, he did a creditable impression of a geyser. Water shot out of his mouth, he coughed, he spluttered, he flailed. In fact, he flailed so much that he almost knocked Buffy underwater again. She barely managed to keep out of the way.

“It’s okay!” Buffy said, in what she hoped was a reassuring way. “You’re okay, there was just a… I don’t really know what happened, maybe some kind of explosion, but-“

“I know what happened,” Ptonomy interrupted. His eyes were wide and he was breathing hard. He’d lost his hat. “I remember.”

“Of course you do,” Buffy replied. “Do you know where Kerry is?”

Ptonomy shook his head. “No. But if we’re okay, chances are that she is too. If anyone could survive something like that, it would be her.”

Buffy jack-knifed out of the water so that she could see over the waves. “Shore's over there. Not far. Do you feel up to it?”

Ptonomy nodded tiredly, and began swimming in the direction that she’d pointed.

Buffy swam after him. She realised, as she did so, that she didn’t need to follow him. She could easily take the lead, if she wanted to. She could power through the water like a miniature speedboat. She felt amazing. Her headache was gone, and she no longer felt bruised and broken. She felt full of energy and as clear as a bell. She hadn’t felt like this since… well, since before Clockworks, since before she’d been full of drugs and tension and everything else that came with her mind working the way it did.

She remembered Giles telling her that there were spells to invoke water spirits, to speed up a journey or to heal someone. Before the boat had broken apart, it _had_ been moving ridiculously quickly. That was probably why it had broken in the first place. And she _did_ feel better. She’d breathed out… something, and the current had swept it away, and now she felt great.

But that would mean that a figment of her imagination had summoned something magical, and that just didn’t make sense, not at all. Not even in a world of mutants and people who remember everything. 

Not even in a world that had someone who seemed to be a Slayer, complete with sword.

The shore was a small, rocky beach that was barely more than a few feet long, with a cliff rearing up behind it. Kerry was waiting for them, sprawled on her back, propping herself upright with her elbows. Buffy was about to ask why she hadn’t come out to help them – Kerry was the closest thing to a real life Slayer that she’d ever seen, if Ptonomy had been unconscious she could have towed him ashore – but then she saw her leg. 

It was covered in blood, for one thing. For another, it was bent at an angle that legs shouldn’t really be bent at. 

“You took your time,” Kerry remarked. Her voice was carefully light, but Buffy could hear the pain in it. She recognised that voice. She’d heard it a lot, when she trained Slayers. She’d even used it herself.

“Dislocated?” Ptnonomy asked, breathlessly. Buffy glanced at him, to see if he was okay, but he seemed fine. He was a bit out of breath, and he’d lost his gun, but he was standing normally and he didn’t seem to be twisted in pain.

“Yup. I was at the front of the boat. I was thrown clear, but a bit of wood hit me. Tore up my leg a bit too, but it looks worse than it is.”

Ptonomy nodded. “Right then.” He knelt down by her side. “Okay. We’ll need to flex and straighten your leg. It’s going to hurt a bit.”

“Really? Never would’ve guessed.”

“Here, let me help.” Buffy knelt beside Ptonomy. “You straighten the leg and I’ll put pressure against the side of the knee.”

Ptonomy looked at her in surprise, but shifted so that she had better access. She caught the look and flashed a smile at him. “You pick up a thing or too, when you’re training to be a… well, never mind. Just push. Slowly now. Hold on, Kerry.”

There was a slight popping sound as the kneecap slid back into place. Kerry grunted, but otherwise gave no sign that she was in pain.

“Okay then,” Buffy said, “just stay off your feet for the next couple of days and you’ll be fine.”

Ptonomy looked at her. “Next couple of days?”

“Yeah, sure.” Buffy paused for a moment. “Hold on. People don’t normally heal that quickly, do they?”

“Not normally, no.”

Buffy sagged. “I-I think, um, I think there’s something wrong. In my head. I remember… things, things I know, things I’ve done but… it wasn’t _me_ doing them. I remember learning first aid, how to treat physical trauma and stuff like this, but _I_ never learnt that. I was always in a psychiatric hospital. I didn’t really get the chance to learn those things. Plus, in my other life I was kind of scared of hospitals, after the whole thing with my mom, and…”

Kerry stared at her, brow furrowed. “I’m not the only one who didn’t really get that, right?”

“I remember fixing a dislocated knee once, out in the field. But the hands doing it aren’t my hands. The memory isn’t mine. Now that I think about it, it feels fuzzy, like a dream, but while I was fixing your knee it was _so_ sharp.” Buffy shrugged awkwardly. “I think I’ve got Giles’ memories in my head. Some of them, at least.”

“Who’s Giles?” Ptonomy asked. “I know he’s not someone who was at Clockworks.”

“He’s someone from my other life. The one where I fight vampires, you know, the one I told you about. But it never happened. He doesn’t even _exist_.”

“You want to fill me in on this-“ Kerry began, but Ptonomy touched her hand gently, and her eyes unfocused for a moment. A moment later, Ptonomy let go and she was back. “Oh.”

“Just sharing my memory of what you told me while we were walking to the boat,” Ptonomy explained.

“So, this world with magic and demons and stuff… is it also a world with gigantic hands made out of water which shove boats so hard that they break apart?” Kerry asked.

Buffy shrugged again. “I don’t know. The magic thing wasn’t really, well, _my_ thing. I just hit things, mainly. I don’t remember any things with water hands. But, um, before we got to the boat, Giles appeared. He cast a spell that was supposed to make the boat go faster. And heal me, too, I think. I was kind of out of it.” 

“We should really get you to Cary,” Kerry and Ptonomy said, almost in unison.

“You mentioned Cary before. Who are they?”

Ptonomy looked down at Kerry. “Do you want to, or-“

“I’m fine.” Kerry shuffled slightly on the rocky beach. “So, uh, once upon a time two Native American people had a child. He was white. There was some problems with that – accusations of cheating, things like that. But the tests said that he _was_ their child. It was just some freak genetic thing. They called him Cary. Then, when he was about eight, he woke up one morning to find a girl playing with his train set.” Kerry smiled. “That was me. We are two people in one body. He does all the boring things, eating, sleeping, sciencing. When there’s nothing to do, I’m inside him. When there’s people to catch or anything like that, I come out. When I dislocated my knee, he’ll have felt it. He’ll find us.”

Buffy digested that as best she could. Two people in one body sounded weird to her, especially if one of them could come out every now and then and _not_ be two people in one body. But then again, she regularly saw people that didn’t exist, so who was she to judge?


	6. Chapter Six

It was a little over an hour before they heard people moving at the top of the cliff above them. By that point, Ptonomy had begun shivering violently. Buffy had suggested that it might be a good idea to get out of his wet clothes, or at least some of them – wearing a three piece suit meant that he had several layers of wet clothes clinging to his skin, and if anything was conducive to hypothermia, that was it. Ptonomy had categorically refused, though, even though Buffy had tried to convince him. She’d thought it was shock or something until she caught Kerry’s expression, which told her that this was definitely not a subject to continue.

Kerry herself seemed surprisingly okay. Although she was clearly in some pain, she’d managed to bind her leg so that it wasn’t bleeding anymore, and though she was cold she didn’t seem to be on the verge of hypothermia. Buffy had asked her about that, and she’d said that Cary shared some of her physical issues, even when they were far apart.

Buffy was doing the best of the three, which, admittedly, wasn’t saying much. Although Giles’ memories were fading rapidly, the sense of wellbeing and strength that had come over her after all that icky black stuff had left her was taking longer to dissipate. She hadn’t had any dissociative episodes, and there hadn’t been any visits from people who didn’t exist.

When Buffy heard the voices above them, she looked to Kerry for two reasons. The first was the same reason that she always looked at people she was with when she heard voices – she wanted to check if they heard the voices too. She second was to see if she should call out for help. Though Kerry had said that Cary would be able to track her down, she had also said that it might take her some time. For all she knew, it could be Division Three, or even someone who saw their boat burst apart.

Kerry’s expression, though, told her quite clearly that help had arrived. “Cary! Cary! We’re down here!”

“See, I told you she was here,” someone, probably Cary, said. 

“What you actually said was ‘She’s around here somewhere, I don’t know where, but definitely here’,” a male voice responded dryly.

“Now isn’t the time for nitpicking, Rudy. Now, do you want to bring them up or not?”

“I don’t know if they’re injured or not. It might be better if I didn’t move them. I should probably send you down instead.”

Although Buffy couldn’t see Cary, even from where she was she could sense the anxiety radiating from him. “Kerry? Anyone else injured?” Buffy noticed that he didn’t ask if Kerry was injured herself - although it was dark and neither of the two seemed to have brought any flashlights, he just seemed to _know_ that she was.

“No, but Ptonomy is shivering a lot,” Kerry said, after a pause.

“See! _Now_ can you bring them up?"

“Sure, sure,” the other person - Rudy? - replied. “You all ready down there?”

“Yes!” Kerry shouted enthusiastically.

“Yeah,” Ptonomy said, his teeth chattering.

“What about you?” Rudy called.

Buffy didn’t reply for a couple of seconds before she realised that the only person he could be talking to was her. “Uh, sure, I guess so.” She didn’t know how he could be seeing her. Maybe he was some kind of mutant that could see in the dark. Slayers could, so maybe mutants could too. What did she know?

What she did know, but didn’t believe, was that Ptonomy was now slowly floating through the air. When they’d mentioned bringing them up, Buffy had thought that it was probably going to involve ropes, or something like that. If ropes were involved here, then they were invisible.

Kerry, for her part, reacted like this was perfectly normal and didn’t seem to catch that Buffy was utterly bewildered. Because of that, Buffy didn’t think that she was able to ask about what was going on. For all she knew, it _wasn’t_ really going on and was in fact just something in her head. It wasn’t any less crazy than a furiously singing Spike or an extremely dead Lenny.

After a few moments, Kerry too was being hoisted aloft. Although she grunted in discomfort, she wasn’t dangled. Now that Buffy thought about it, it was more like she was in an invisible elevator.

And then it was Buffy’s turn.

It was really, really weird. It didn’t feel like there was anything below her, moving her up. It didn’t feel like anything at all. She was just moving upwards, and there didn’t seem to be any reason for it. It was just what she was doing.

And then she was up at the top, and she screamed.

She’d expected people, ordinary people. Sure, they were mutants, but as far as she knew that didn’t mean that they didn’t look like people. The two people at the top of the cliff definitely _didn’t_ look like people. Their eyes, for one thing, jutted several inches out from their heads and had an unearthly green glitter. One of them was crouched over Ptonomy, wrapping him in something (a cocoon?), while supporting itself on a massively long arm that spread into three prong-like fingers. Kerry was nowhere to be seen - surely they couldn’t have eaten her already?

At her scream, the two of them flinched, looking about wildly. 

It was only then that Buffy realised two things.

Firstly, they were wearing night vision goggles.

Secondly, she was _stupid_.

Of course they were wearing night vision goggles. How else would they be able to see in the dark without flashlights? And one of the figures didn’t have a creepily long arm – he just was using a walking stick. Kerry hadn’t been eaten, either, she’d probably just been… reabsorbed, or whatever the right term was, which explained _why_ he was using a walking stick. Cary was dealing with Kerry’s injuries.

She hoped that night vision goggles couldn’t pick up the look of absolute mortification on her face, but just to be doubly sure, she covered it with her hands in embarrassment. Buffy the Slayer wouldn’t have made that mistake. “Sorry! Sorry, I just saw the goggles and didn’t get that they were goggles at first, because it’s dark, and I thought you were some sort of bug people or something and I… well, anyway, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” replied the person that she was pretty sure was called Rudy. “People have had worse reactions to seeing us.” Although he sounded like he was on the verge of laughing, there was still a certain edge to that last sentence. 

“I’m Rudy, by the way,” he added, extending a hand for her to shake. 

“Buffy.” At least he had the grace not to look amused by her name. “How did you get us up the cliff like that?”

“Telekinesis. I move things with my mind.”

“Speaking of,” Cary said behind them, “Ptonomy is ready to be moved to the jeep.”

“Right, if you’ll excuse me a moment…” Rudy turned around to face Ptonomy and gently lifted a hand. Ptonomy began hovering in the air as well and, when Rudy made a slight pushing motion, he began moving towards a big car a few hundred feet away.

It was strange, Buffy thought. While you _could_ do something like that with magic, most people didn’t. At least not without some invocation of some sort, or something. Unless you were Willow, of course. But this didn’t feel like magic. When she’d been lifted into the air, it hadn’t felt like she was being lifted _by_ anything. It was just a thing that was happening. It wasn’t magic. He wasn’t using any kind of energy to move things through the air. He just wanted them to do so, and a little thing like gravity wasn’t going to get a say in the matter.

“So, Buffy,” Rudy said casually, as though he hadn’t casually levitated someone hundreds of feet with a wave of his hand, “what happened to the boat? Was it Division Three?”

“I, uh, think I might have, sort of, accidently, wrecked it. A little bit.” 

Buffy saw Rudy’s eyebrows rise up behind his goggles. “Well, okay then.”

~*~

The drive to Summerland was pretty awkward. For one thing, Ptonomy was pretty out of it. For another, once Cary took off his goggles, Buffy saw that he was much, much older than Kerry. He was probably closer to seventy than anything else, and Kerry was probably barely twenty. Buffy didn’t understand how that worked. If they were two people in one body (at least usually), shouldn’t they be the same age? She had quite a few questions, but she didn’t really feel comfortable asking them. She didn’t think she could just come right out and ask him why he was so old. 

Plus, they kept asking her questions that she couldn’t answer. She didn’t know how her powers worked – she didn’t even feel as though she _had_ powers, she just happened to know some people who did. She was pretty sure that she hadn’t been the one to destroy Clockworks, although given the whole boat incident she wasn’t as sure of that as she had once been. She thought Clockworks had been David, but again, she wasn’t really sure about that. She couldn’t even tell them where David might be, although she did remember that he had a sister. She told them that, if she was in David's shoes and she’d just broken out of a psychiatric hospital, the first thing she’d do would be to go and see her family. That had made them be quiet, at least for a little while. 

Buffy realised that she actually _had_ broken out of Clockworks. Of course, the building had been almost entirely destroyed and she’d been buried beneath it for two days – oh God, her family probably thought she was dead.

She ignored the little, mean voice at the back of her head that doubted that they thought about her at all. Joyce was the queen of head-in-the-sand thinking – she’d probably trained herself to ignore the fact that she had a daughter who saw things that weren’t there. Hank had been half out the door anyway when her problems had first started, and chances were he hadn’t even thought about her since then. They’d never visited. And Dawn, of course, didn’t exist.

She had to be practical. She had to be. She didn’t have a choice. She was not going to break down, here and now. She wasn’t. Sure, she didn’t have access to any drugs to help deaden the pain, but then Buffy the Slayer hadn’t either and she’d survived far worse. Admittedly, not with the healthiest of psyches, but then mental health wasn’t exactly high on Buffy’s lists of priorities. Until she was able to do something, she was just going to bottle everything up.

Yeah. Yeah, that sounded healthy.

And then they were at Summerland, and Buffy stopped thinking about that. Well, she didn't, but the thoughts just started running at the back of her mind, a rumble of a distant underground train. At some point it was going to pull into the station and all hell was going to break lose, but that wasn’t going to happen _just_ yet.

“Home sweet home,” Rudy said. “What d’you think?”

Buffy had expected… well, she wasn’t really sure what she’d expected. Some sort of secret underground bunker, probably. That seemed like the kind of place where people hiding from the government _should_ live.

This, however, was a beautiful building, long and low. There were dozens of windows looking out onto the forest, and Buffy was sure that, in day time, the view would be breath-taking. It looked more like the summer retreat of someone ridiculously wealthy than the kind of place that took in and protected people with powers.

“I told you,” Ptonomy said. It was the first thing he’d said for quite some time, and though his voice crackled a little bit he sounded much better than he had before. “We’re people. Just… humans, who are different. We shouldn’t have to hide ourselves away underground like animals. So we don’t.”

“It’s perfect,” Buffy said.


	7. Chapter Seven

There was a room ready for her. Buffy had been somewhat disconcerted by that until Cary had told her that the room hadn’t been prepared with her _specifically_ in mind – Ptonomy and Kerry had gone out looking for the mutant that had destroyed Clockworks, and the room had been made ready in case they were able to bring them back.

They obviously hadn’t had a clue about what that mutant might be like, Buffy reflected, as she found a shirt that was longer than she was tall in a chest of drawers. But there was a shower, and that was pretty much the best news in the entire world. Although Cary told her a few things about Summerland, she wasn’t listening. Every fibre of her body was focused on the prospect of being _clean_. Even so, she caught a few words – Melanie, tests, something about a bird. After a few minutes, though, Cary seemed to pick up that she wasn’t listening to a word that he’d been saying, and wished her good night.

Buffy was in the shower almost before he’d left. She was in there for a long time. The hot water went a long way towards soothing away the various aches and pains that developed from sitting on a rocky beach in cold, wet clothes. It was even enough to make her not care when she found that, though there were still traces of blood in her hair, there was no actual wound.

But eventually she got out, put on one of the comically oversized shirts and got into bed, her hair still damp.

Sleep had never been something that Buffy was good at. Usually, she blamed her insomnia on the regimen of drugs that the psychiatrists at Clockworks had foisted on her. Sometimes, usually on bad days, she wondered if her mind was so used to being up every night fighting monsters that it just wouldn’t let her body sleep. Occasionally, she thought that it could be as simple as the constant low light everywhere in Clockworks, which was just bright enough to make sleeping difficult.

As a result, Buffy hadn’t expected to get to sleep easily. She’d thought that the prospect of finding out what was wrong with her in the morning would be enough to keep her up. But she was wrong, because she was asleep pretty much as soon as her head hit the pillow.

It wasn’t a particularly restful sleep. She tossed and turned. Her mind was full of muddled images, thoughts and feelings that were only partly hers. When she awoke, she couldn’t remember any of them specifically. Just that they had happened. 

Though the sun had risen, that didn’t really mean much to her, as she’d been awake most of the night. It wasn’t until she looked at the clock on her bedside table that she realised that it was closer to dusk than dawn. She’d slept through almost the entire day, and she felt about as rested as someone who had taken a brief nap.

Worse than that was the fact that Drusilla was sitting across the room from her, cross-legged on the floor with her back against the wall. She had blood on one hand which had run down her wrist, and she was licking it like a cat. Buffy was absolutely certain that the blood didn’t belong to the vampire.

“You’re awake. Finally.”

“Yup.” Buffy got up stiffly and began looking for clothes that actually fit her. Idly, she wondered who owned Summerland. Had someone told her already?

“He’s waiting for you, you know. The man with the girl inside him.”

“Well, tell Cary he can wait a bit longer. If I don’t get some coffee soon, someone’s gonna die and it’ll probably be me." Buffy squinted at Drusilla. “Any chance you’ll go away while I hunt for some?”

“I can hear that one pacing,” Drusilla said, completely ignoring Buffy’s question. “His leg aches when he’s still too long, and though he knows that he should be still, there’s too much inside him. He’s restless, yes, and he’s waiting.”

“I’ll take that as a no.” Buffy found some clothes, shot a look at Drusilla, and carried them through into the bathroom. She even locked the door, although she knew that that wouldn’t have stopped the vampire even if she’d been real. 

“She’s a twitchy little thing, the girl inside him,” Drusilla said. Though her voice wasn’t particularly loud, Buffy still heard it easily through the door. It had a curiously penetrating quality. “Always likes to be out and doing things. _He_ doesn’t like to do things. He likes to be, to exist, to learn. He knows that he should be patient and wait for you, that he shouldn’t be swayed by her – after all, they aren’t the same – but he is anyway. He wants to know what you are.”

“Great. Good to know,” Buffy mumbled as she pulled a shirt over her head. She knew she didn’t have to speak loudly. Drusilla’s vampiric hearing was more than good enough to pick up every word.

Plus, there was the fact that Drusilla actually only existed in her head.

“Do you think she’s a worm?”

Buffy blinked, thrown by the non-sequitur. “What, Kerry? I can safely say no to that one.”

“But she lives inside other people.”

“Worms generally live in the ground.”

“Do they? How dull.”

Buffy stretched idly, her back popping as it arched. She didn’t want to take a test with Drusilla around. While there were definitely people in her head who would be worse, there weren’t that many. Plus, the vampire’s loopy rambling had always unnerved Buffy. It made her feel uncomfortable - she was always worried that she sounded the same. 

But she _did_ want to see Cary, and she _did_ want to find out what she could do.

As though she’d read her mind, or perhaps more accurately as though she lived inside it, Drusilla chose that moment to speak. “Are you done yet?”

“Not quite.”

“How about now?”

“Still no.”

“Why are your nos still? Don’t you move back and forth, negating here, negating there, a dance of no no no?”

“Nope. Still not ready, by the way.”

“You were much faster when you were the Slayer.” The pout was audible.

Buffy didn’t bother to reply. Instead, she took a deep breath, unlocked the door and then walked out.

Drusilla applauded wildly. “Come on! Time to go.” She propelled herself to her feet in one smooth, sinuous motion.

Buffy walked out of her room. She was in a corridor – there were several other doors leading off of it, but they were all closed. There were no signs that she could see. She wondered if Cary had given her directions or something yesterday and she just hadn’t been paying attention. “I, uh, have no idea where to go.”

Drusilla spoke right next to Buffy’s ear, causing her to jump. “You know, if I had breath in my lungs, I’d sigh.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Buffy muttered. She decided, purely arbitrarily, that the right hand corridor was the right direction to take.

“You’re going the wrong way, you know.”

“Yeah? Well, you don’t even exist. You know the things I know. That means that you don’t know the way to go either.”

“I can hear him, though. Every heartbeat. I hear him when he talks to the self that is not himself. He’s writing, now. His pen goes _scritch scritch scritch_. And he’s that way.” Drusilla pointed slightly upwards, and to the left.

Buffy sighed. Drusilla smiled, exposing far too many teeth. “Fine. Whatever. I guess I’ve got no better plans.”

“Oh goody! Follow me,” Drusilla spun on her heel and walked off, dress swishing around her.

“You know,” Drusilla remarked conversationally, a few moments later, “if you wanted to, you could hear him too.”

“Me?”

“No, not you.”

“Uh, what?”

“Never mind.”

That suited Buffy just fine. She had no intention of paying any heed to anything Drusilla said. She was only following her because she had nothing better to do.

Drusilla led her up a flight of stairs. It was at that point that Buffy realised that she had yet to see even a single person. From what she’d seen, Summerland was a big building. She’d be really surprised if it just had Ptonomy, Cary/Kerry and Rudy in it. 

“I realise that I’ll probably regret asking this, but do you by any chance happen to know where everyone is?”

“Eating. The sound of chewing and swallowing is deafening. The clink of teeth on forks. So inelegant. Should be teeth on flesh. Or bone, if you bite deep enough. Everyone’s eating, except for the people who aren’t, of course. But did you know, not one of them, not one, not a _single_ person, is eating cherry pie?”

“Huh. David’ll be sad, if they manage to find him and get him here. Cherry pie’s his favourite food. If he could eat nothing but that then…” Buffy trailed off. She’d just remembered something.

Right before the whole Clockwork collapsing thing, they’d been having a conversation about cherry pie. Syd had said she didn’t like it, and David had wondered how that could possibly be the case. 

And then the building had collapsed, and a bunch of people had been found dead in giant cherries.

“If he could eat nothing but that, then he’d end up with veins full of crushed cherries and a heart made out of pie crust?” Drusilla supplied helpfully.

“Not quite,” Buffy replied absently. Of _course_ David had collapsed Clockworks. She didn’t know how, but suddenly manifesting cherries definitely seemed like something he would do, if he could. And they’d been talking about cherry pies...

“No? Ah well. We’re here, anyway.” Drusilla gestured at the door in front of her. 

Buffy took a deep breath and opened the door. Even as she did so, she wondered if she should have knocked – what if this was the wrong room, and she about to stumble into someone’s bedroom or something? All she had to go on was the word of a non-existent, mentally unstable vampire. 

But, sure enough, there was Cary sitting at a desk, writing. When he saw Buffy, he made a movement that indicated that he planned to stand up, before realising that that wasn’t a good idea. Instead, he simply wheeled his chair away from the desk. “Buffy! Hello! How are you?”

“Hi. I’m good – how’s Kerry?”

“Good, good, she’s just resting at the moment.”

“So, um, I think you said something about tests yesterday, or this morning, I guess, and, uh, can we do them?”

“Absolutely.” Cary scooted across to a nearby table and picked up a handful of electrodes. “Do you mind if I plug you in?”

“That depends,” Buffy said warily. “Are we skipping the tests and going to straight to a round of ECT?”

“Electroconvulsive therapy? No, of course not. It’s just a device to monitor your brainwaves.”

Buffy walked over and sat opposite Cary. While he attached the electrodes to her, Drusilla hopped up on the table next to them.

“Alright then. I hear that you see people who don’t exist, and you have dissociative episodes when you remember an alternate version of yourself?” Buffy nodded. “Is there anyone here now?”

Buffy looked up at Drusilla, who waved cheerfully. “Yeah.”

“Okay. Can you ask them to move that?” Cary pointed to a glass of water on the table.

“Why? She’s not really here. She can’t touch anything.”

“Well, the last person you spoke to who didn’t exist summoned some kid of water elemental which _did_ exist and managed to destroy our boat.”

“Fair enough. Drusilla, could you move the glass of water?”

“Nope.”

“She says no, Cary.”

“Why?”

“Wh-“

“I heard the first time. I’m not here. I see, I hear. I do not touch.” Drusilla ran a hand along her dress. “Never to touch or hold or kiss again. Just limbo.”

“She says that she isn’t really here, so she can’t touch anything.”

“Can she use, uh, magic to move the glass?”

“She’s a vampire. Not really big on the magic. More the eating people.”

“I see.” Cary shot a look at a monitor off to the side. After a moment, he nodded, seemingly satisfied. 

“He believes me,” Drusilla said. “He believes I’m here. I can smell the belief quickening within him. Smells like glue.”

Cary picked up a deck of cards. “I’m going to take a card out of here and look at it. If, uh, Drusilla wouldn’t mind, she can look at it too. I’d like to see if she can tell you which card it is.”

Buffy looked up at the vampire, who shrugged. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”

Cary picked up a card. Drusilla peered over his shoulder. Buffy hadn’t even seen her move. “Four of swords.”

“What?”

“Four of swords,” Drusilla repeated firmly.

“Cary, that’s just an ordinary deck of cards, right?”

“Yes. Why?”

“She thinks it’s a tarot card or something. Says it’s the four of swords.”

“Interesting.” Cary flipped the card around. “Four of spades. If I remember correctly, that’s the equivalent of swords in a tarot deck.”

“Okay. What do I do with that?”

“Not sure.” Cary pulled another card and looked at her expectantly.

“The World.”

Buffy repeated that, and Cary frowned. “The Major Arcana don’t have counterparts in standard decks.”

“Oh, that’s not the card he pulled,” Drusilla said. “Just the one you needed to see.”

Buffy rubbed her eyes tiredly. “I probably should’ve mentioned that Drusilla wasn’t the, um, most stable of people. A really sadistic vampire decided to make a project out of her.”

“That’s fine. I think I’ve got what I needed to.” Cary smiled. “I think I know what’s going on.”


	8. Chapter Eight

Buffy had expected to be excited. She _had_ been excited, earlier, before she’d gone to sleep. She’d even been excited just a few minutes before, when Drusilla had shown her the way to Cary. But she didn’t feel excited now. She just felt tired. There was nothing but a sense of deep, overwhelming weariness.

“You know,” Buffy said, “a lot of people have told me that. They’ve said oh, you’ve got such and such a thing, if you take this handful of drugs and go to therapy regularly you’ll be just fine and dandy. Hasn’t exactly been true.”

“To be fair though, those people haven’t been me.”

“True. Most of them have been psychiatrists, though there was one time when Mom brought out this New Age dude who prescribed crystals and one of those head massage thingies. A mutant is a new thing to me.”

“That’s just it. None of those people have seen the things that I’ve seen. They don’t know the things that I know. They all thought that there was something broken in your mind, because nothing can think like you do and be whole. But I know things they don’t, and I’ve seen things they wouldn’t believe. So.”

“Fine. Lay it on me,” Buffy said. She’d like to believe that he was right, that he could help, but she’d seen too much for that. She had too many memories.

“Have you ever heard of the Astral Plane?” Cary said. He sounded like Giles had used to, when he’d asked those sort of questions. As though he knew that she didn’t, because he was the one who did the research, and it was her job to pay attention to about half of it and then mangle the rest.

“Yes,” Buffy and Drusilla said at the same time.

“Well, the Astral Plane is – wait, you _do_ know about it?”

“Uh huh. Had a friend who spent a bunch of time in it. Even missed an apocalypse while she was there.”

“Right,” Cary said, looking mildly disconcerted. “Well, anyway, as you know, the Astral Plane is a place that isn’t quite dream and isn’t quite reality. It’s both, but neither. Time and space aren’t really real there and, this is the important thing, there’s only one of it.”

“Why’s that important? There’s only one of a lot of places.”

Cary grinned. “Except that’s not true! There’s an infinite amount of nearly everywhere. There are an infinite number of Summerlands, for example. They’re just a world away, separated by the thickness of a shadow. An infinite number of things on an infinite number of worlds.”

“Uh, okay. Like all those hell dimensions?”

“Sure. I guess. You’ll have to tell me about those sometime. Anyway, the thing is, there’s only one Astral Plane. Here, on this world, you can reach it if you’re a powerful psychic. I’m not sure how your friend managed to get there, but it would be the exact same one as the one we can get to from here.”

Buffy looked at him for a long time. “I swear, if you say I’m picking up, like, static from another version of me then I’m going to riot.”

Cary paused. Drusilla giggled. “He was going to say that! You can see his throat bobbing as he swallows his words.”

“I… I do think that you’re picking up stray memories from another version of you, yes. You’re entangled, like two particles, except – well, let’s just say that you, being a mutant and probably more than a bit psychic, are picking up more than just a bit of static. Quite a lot more.”

Buffy looked at the vampire perched on the table next to her, who smiled at her toothily. “You mean like vampires and demons and hell gods.”

“Yes.”

“How can I make it stop?” Buffy asked while Drusilla pouted theatrically.

“Well, I can probably make something to, uh, disentangle you a bit, settle you more in the here and now instead of the, um, _over there_. But that’ll take a little while and it’ll have to wait until you get back.”

Buffy frowned. “I’m going somewhere?”

“Yes. Didn’t you speak to Melanie?”

“Who’s Melanie?”

“I told you about her this morning… though I suppose you didn’t hear me over the call of your bed.” Cary smiled sheepishly.

Now that he mentioned that, Buffy did dimly remember something about that. “Oh, right. Yeah. Totally wasn’t listening. So where am I going?”

“We think we found David – he’s at a motel near his sister’s place, he’s staying there with another patient from Clockworks. Given his… power, and his probable mental state, we thought it would probably for the best if someone he recognised went to pick him up.”

“There was another survivor? Was it Lenny?” Buffy said, although she realised even as she spoke that there was no chance of Lenny still being alive. She’d seen her twisted, broken body. Nothing could look like that and be alive.

Cary’s brow furrowed. “No.”

“It’s Syd, isn’t it?” Buffy wondered if it had been David or Syd who had ultimately been behind the collapse of Clockworks. Sure, a lot of weird stuff happened around David, but having Syd show up the same day as the whole incident going down seemed more than a little suspicious.

“It is.”

“So, just to make sure I’ve got this right, I’ve got to go to… I don’t even know where, so that I can try to convince someone with literally earth-shattering power, plus his girlfriend with touchy-feely issues, to come back to a secret mutant base. Which, incidentally, is also somewhere I don’t know the location of. That the sitch?”

Cary scratched his head. “Melanie would have explained it better. She was supposed to give you a tour, some sort of induction thing. This is her place, after all.”

“This is her – you know what, never mind. Just wanted to check that there wasn’t anything I missed.”

“Well, we were planning on sending Rudy out with you. He’s handy when things go sideways, and besides, Ptonomy seems to be coming down with something and we aren’t exactly raring to go either.”

Buffy was about to ask who ‘we’ was before she realised that he was probably referring to Kerry. “Is _that_ everything?”

“Yes.”

“Cool. When do we leave?”

~*~

As it turned out, it wasn’t quite as simple as just getting in a car and speeding off. Cary called Melanie and briefly told her what had happened. Melanie showed up with Rudy in tow a few minutes later.

Melanie wasn’t quite what Buffy had expected. For one thing, Buffy was used to the women in charge of secret, quasi-supernatural operations to be very young and, generally, look even younger. A side effect of spending a lot of time with Slayers. Melanie, however, looked like she was about Cary’s age. 

Buffy’s memories also told her that the kind of people who ran these sort of things were almost pathologically cheery, because if they weren’t then, well, they might just realise that they spent pretty much every waking moment either killing things, or thinking about how to kill things. It was, Buffy knew, not a healthy attitude, but then Slaying wasn’t exactly a healthy job.

Melanie, however, just looked sad. Not in the sense that she seemed pathetic. She was dressed smartly, and her pale blonde hair was immaculately coiffured – she seemed every inch the professional. She just seemed melancholy, as though she had been doing this too long, and she was tired, and she’d lost too much, and one of the things that she’d lost was the ability to _stop_, to _rest_. Buffy recognised that look. She’d seen it in the mirror often enough.

There was also another person who came in with Melanie, one that Buffy didn’t recognise. A squat man in an old fashioned white suit, with a salt and pepper beard. He looked mildly bemused, as if he wasn’t quite sure where he was or how he’d gotten there. He spent most of his time wandering around the room, humming to himself under his breath. Given that no one introduced him or even paid him any attention, Buffy assumed that he wasn’t actually there. 

While Melanie essentially recapped what Cary had already said, she idly wondered where she’d met him before. She definitely didn’t recognise him, and in a room full of people she didn’t feel comfortable asking him who he was. She would have assumed that he was a vampire, from his fashion sense, if it wasn’t for the fact that he was obviously breathing. Some kooky friend of Joyce’s, perhaps?

Eventually it got to the point where it was pretty much as simple as getting in a car and going. Melanie seemed eager for them to bring David back, which Buffy understood – she knew exactly what it was like when there was a new Slayer out there. They were dangerous, to themselves and to others, and they didn’t know _any_ of the things that they should – sure, having them as part of the Council wasn’t likely to extend their life expectancy all that much, but at least they weren’t out on the streets causing havoc. Or in this case, levelling buildings with a thought.

To be honest, Buffy was glad that they were sending her. It would be nice to see David again, and if she had to go through all of this crazy mutant-y stuff then it would a comfort if someone she knew was going through it too.

Even so, she surprised herself by saying “I’d like to talk to Ptonomy before I go.” As far as she was aware, she hadn’t even been thinking about him, but after she’d spoken she realised that she really felt as though she should apologise to him. If he was ill, then it was almost certainly because she’d broken their boat apart and catapulted him into icy water. Not all of them could be healed by water elementals or be absorbed by guys old enough to be their grandfather.

Rudy made an indelicate noise. “Wouldn’t advise that. Man’s an unholy terror when he’s ill.”

Buffy shrugged. Very little was worse than dealing with injured Slayers who wanted to be back out in the field. She was pretty sure she could handle it. “I think I’ll be okay.”

Melanie shot Cary a look, and Buffy got the impression that she was missing something. She felt vaguely like she had wandered into some sort of test, but she hadn’t the faintest idea what was being tested or why. “We can hold off a little while. Just don’t take too long.”

~*~

“Here we go,” Rudy said, pointing at a door that was slightly ajar. “Don’t bother knocking. He won’t answer.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem. I’ll just be round the corner, let me know when you’re ready to go.”

Rudy wandered off, and Buffy gently pushed open the door.

Ptonomy was lying on his bed, fully dressed. It was unlikely that he was wearing the same suit that he had been earlier, but Buffy had to admit that it seemed like it was identical, even down to the hat resting by his side. He had his fingers laced over his chest, and his eyes were closed. His skin looked slightly waxy and there was a slight whistling sound when he breathed.

All in all, it looked like he was asleep, but Buffy rather doubted that. She suspected that he wasn’t here, just as the soldier back at Clockworks hadn’t really been there. Oh, there was a body that was physically present, but the mind was somewhere, _somewhen_ else. He was in one of his memories, thinking about a better time when he wasn’t ill. It made sense. It’s what Buffy would do, if she could. 

The room in general was incredibly sparse. There was the bed, a desk, a chair, but there were no mementoes, no indication that anyone actually lived there. It looked like the room that they’d set up for her; distinctly lacking in any form of personality.

She pulled out the chair and sat by the bed. “Um. So. Hi, I guess. Not really sure whether you can hear me. Figured I should, you know, apologise, say sorry, that sort of-“

There was something like a ripple in the air, like a heat haze out in the desert, or perhaps there wasn’t, and then-

I waited, counting to ten before I opened the door. Father would be home, of course, he always was, but there was always the chance that he wouldn’t notice that I was there. The side of my face feels like it’s on fire, like someone has taken it and pressed it against hot metal. They haven’t, of course, though the sensation of fists against my face wasn’t actually too far from that. My skinned knuckles, however, formed a counter-point, a lighter, fiercer pain. 

Not good, of course. None of this was good. I’d be yelled at for fighting. Asked if I remember what Father did in the war, when of course I remember, I have seen the memories that leak from his head. I remember the artillery shell, close, too close, _too close_. I remember it better than he does, and he remembers it so hard that he wakes up screaming in the night.

\- and now Buffy was back.

Ptonomy’s voice was cracked and raspy. “What are you doing?”

Buffy shook her head, as though to clear it. That hadn’t been her memory, she was absolutely certain of that. Though the hands were younger and the body had been shorter, she definitely recognised them as Ptonomy’s. “I, uh, just wanted to apologise for making you sick.”

“Stay out of my head.”

“Sorry. Don’t really know how I got in. Sorry.”

“Get out.”

Buffy did.

Rudy was waiting for her, and looked at her shrewdly as she went round the corner at something faster than a walk but slower than a run. “Everything okay?”

Buffy shook her head again. Having memories of a different version of herself had been enough to ruin her life. She’d thought that she knew what it was like, when he’d said that he remembered everything, but all she’d done is grasped the edges of it. He remembered everything. Not just his memories, but so many others. “That poor, poor man.”


	9. Chapter Nine

Buffy didn’t like driving. It made her anxious. Too many times she’d been in a car that had hit something in the road that had turned out not to be there. She’d never even learned to drive, not officially – it wasn’t a good idea to be behind the wheel when at any moment she might be somewhere else, usually a graveyard. It didn’t help that she _did_ know how to drive, had memories of driving in a body that had much better spatial awareness than her own, one that had the reflexes to take turns that she never would have dreamed of taking.

The worst thing, though, was the way that Rudy drove. It wasn’t that he was _bad_ at it – quite the opposite, he drove with the casual ease of someone who had been doing it for years. It was more the fact that his hands seemed to barely be on the wheel. Sometimes they weren’t even on it at all, just folded in his lap or getting something out of the glove compartment, or, one memorable time, tying one of his shoelaces, which meant that he didn’t even have a foot on the gas at the time. Driving with a telekinetic behind the wheel was _not_ a recipe for happy fun times.

So, she spoke to take her mind off of it. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” Rudy replied easily. 

“When – how did you find out that you could do things? Move things with your mind?” 

Rudy made a faint humming sound as he seamlessly joined a different lane while he stretched. Buffy, carefully not looking at the total lack of hands on the steering wheel, saw a movement in the rear-view mirror and started in surprise. It was just Caleb sprawled in the back seat looking like he owned it. His reflection grinned at her toothily. “You just never stop your prattlin’, do you? It’s enough to bother a man, the idle chit chat, the gossip, yearning to fill-“

“I’ve always been able to move things, I think,” Rudy interrupted – not that he knew that was what he was doing. “I’m told things used to appear in my crib. Toys. My pacifier. Sweets and similar, when I was older. First I remember doing it was when I five or six, and there was this cookie jar, just out of reach, and I wanted it – and then there it was, floating down to me, easy as breathing.”

“You were that young?”

“Uh huh. Course, I wasn’t as good as it then. Used to break things,” Rudy smiled. “My dad got me one those car sets when I was ten, you know the ones, where they go zooming along a track? I loved that thing. Then one day I was grounded, and I was looking out the window like a lovesick pup when this gorgeous car pulls up down the road and I thought, hell, I could drive that. Didn’t even have to leave my room either. I wrapped it right around a telephone pole.”

Well. Comforting that was not. Caleb snorted behind her. “You gonna tell him that he scares you? Or you just gonna sit there and take it? I’ve got to say, I may have hated your guts when you were the Slayer, but this you? It is all sorts of pathetic.” After a moment, he smirked. “I’ll be damned if that don’t lift my spirits to an almost irritating degree.”

Buffy gritted her teeth. Out of all the things that she needed right then, precisely none of them were demented, non-existent ex-preachers. “Uh, Rudy?”

“Hmm? Oh, we’re almost there,” Rudy replied absently, failing to guess what Buffy had been about to say. “Really close, if that’s anything to go by.” He pointed at something in the sky.

Buffy peered upwards, then blinked. “Well. That’s ominous.”

It was a lovely, clear day. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the birds were singing. All in all, you could hardly wish for a nicer day.

Except, of course, that there _was_ a cloud. And it was vast. It looked like a great column of coruscating darkness descending on the city ahead of them. Even though its edges were ragged and roiling, it looked pretty much circular, at least as far as Buffy could see. “Looks like they didn’t get the memo that it was supposed to be a nice day today.”

“Yep. Division Three’ll be there. No way that storm’s natural. We’ll just have to hope that we can make it to David before they find him. Not really in the mood for a rescue mission.”

“Be strong and courageous,” Caleb said with a smirk. “Don’t bother fearin’ them, it won’t help you. Doesn’t mean that it ain’t all manner of fun to see, though.”

Buffy physically tensed as they entered the city. She wasn’t entirely sure what she expected to happen – getting struck by lightning, perhaps, or maybe something even more apocalypse-y. Raining blood was always a good bet.

It _was_ raining. Raining hard. The sounds of raindrops on the roof was nearly deafening, and Rudy instantly shifted the windscreen wipers up to the highest setting before realising that it didn’t do much good. After that he just twitched a finger periodically, and the rain miraculously didn’t hit the windshield. Not that it really helped visibility.

“Looks like your friend’s aimin’ to wash away all the dirty folk. Man after my own heart.”

“We’re here,” Rudy said after a few minutes. 

Buffy looked around. She didn’t see anything that looked like it might be holding a horde of soldiers ready to leap out and grab them. Not that she could even see all that much – it was dark enough out that the streetlights were on, a bright yellow overhead that didn’t illuminate so much as highlight the shadows. 

“Shame you don’t have anyone around who doesn’t need sight to see, isn’t it?” Caleb murmured in her ear. 

Buffy ignored him. “Alright then. Guess we go. Don’t suppose you thought to bring an umbrella?”

Rudy grinned. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that.” He opened his door, then walked around to open Buffy’s. As far as she could tell, he was as dry as a bone. It even looked like he’d managed to avoid stepping in any puddles. That was quite the achievement, given that pretty much everywhere was entirely puddle.

“Well, aren’t you a handy person to have around.”

“I try.”

Buffy got out of the car warily. It was strange. It wasn’t as though the rain struck an invisible barrier or anything. It seemed like the rain just didn’t go where she was. Wherever she was, the rain wasn’t. She was between the raindrops. 

Caleb was out of the car too. Given that he didn’t actually exist, he hadn’t opened a door or anything. He was just spontaneously there, and the rain was falling right through him. “Well? We just going to stand around gossipin' or what?”

As motels went, this wasn’t the worst one she’d ever seen. If she’d been in a world with vampires in it, she’d expect them to aim for some crummier ones before they attacked here. Of course, that wasn’t exactly saying that this was the height of fine moteling.

At the very least, it didn’t look like a troop of soldiers had come through. There was a distinct lack of carnage or broken doors. Of course, that could just mean that the people at Division Three were better at covering their tracks than the Initiative had been.

“Cary said that their room’s this way,” Rudy pointed.

They walked up to the room in question. Buffy took a deep breath, hoped that the door wasn’t going to be yanked open and she’d be facing a room full of guns, and then knocked.

There was a scuffling sound, and some quiet but fierce whispering. Buffy relaxed. It was just David and Syd. They were bright enough to suspect that someone might be coming after them and they’d decided to hide. Admittedly, they weren’t very good at it, but at least they had the right idea.

“They’re hidin’ under the bed,” Caleb called through the door, his voice dancing with amusement. “I _love_ it when they do that.”

“David? It’s me. Buffy.”

There was a pause, and then a somewhat muffled voice replied “Are you sure?”

Buffy shrugged. That was always a difficult question, for her. “Can you…” She gestured at the door.

Rudy nodded, then flicked a finger. The door opened. 

Buffy ignored Caleb, who was leaning back in a chair with his feet up on a table, and walked over to the double bed. She lay down on the floor. “Hey there.”

“Hey,” David replied sheepishly.

“You want to come out?”

“I guess. Any chance that things’ll make some sense when we do?” David said. On his other side, Syd rolled out and stood up, straightening her clothes.

“Maybe. A little bit.” Probably not, she reflected.

David thought it over for a few seconds.

“Come on, David. We don’t have all that much time.”

“You don’t have any time at all,” Caleb said darkly.

Buffy rolled onto her back and looked up at him. He grinned. “They’ve just pulled up outside.”

“Rudy! They’re here. They’re just outside.”

In a moment, Rudy changed from someone leaning against the wall, hands in his pockets, the very picture of nonchalance, to someone tense, filled with energy, as though he was about to spring into action at any moment. “Right then!” With a flick of his hand, tables and chairs were barricading the door. Another movement and the window slammed open. He moved towards Syd. “If I could just draw your attention to the emergency exit, yes, that’s right, the window… it’s a good time to make a speedy getaway, yes, thank you, quickly now-”

Something heavy slammed into the door. It didn’t open, the barricade held, but the door was hardly sturdy. Another couple of slams like that and it would break, and the barricade wouldn’t even matter.

“David, we’ve got to go. They’re after you. Come with me. We’ll explain everything once it’s safe.”

“Oh, they aren’t here for him,” Caleb said conversationally. “He might be as subtle as a thunderstorm, but at least he knows how to keep quiet. It’s you they’ve found. You’re leaking all over the place.”

“_So_ not helpful!” Buffy reached out and grabbed David’s arm, pulling him out from under the bed. She steered him over to the window.

“I’ll hold them off,” Rudy yelled. “Take the car and get out of here.”

Buffy clambered out the window, and felt incredibly glad that David and Syd had chosen a ground floor room. She felt rather less grateful for the ridiculously heavy rain, which soaked her to the bone in a flash. 

Behind her, the door to the room splintered and broke, and a bunch of people with tactical gear and large guns came pouring in. David barely managed to make it through the window before they made it in. Buffy dimly saw them crashing into the walls, the ceiling and each other before she was making a run for it, hoping the other two were behind her, not daring to look back to check.

She was almost at the end of the alley by the time she realised the flaw in the plan. Said flaw turned out to be a half-dozen soldiers.

There was someone else, though, who was conspicuously _not_ a soldier. He was dressed in a rumpled brown suit and had no visible weapons. He had tight, curly hair that was plastered to his head from the rain and, as best as Buffy could tell in the dim light, one eye was a cloudy grey. He was technically smiling – all the pieces were there – but it was a smile in the same way that a shark smiled. He had his prey cornered, and all of them knew it.

“Take-“ he paused, focusing on something next to Buffy. She turned to see Caleb standing there, a matching smile on his face.

“He can see me,” Caleb remarked. “Always nice to be seen.”

“Sir?” One of the soldiers said, her voice muffled by her helmet. “Do we shoot?” 

“Now, ordinarily I’d be more’n happy to see you riddled with bullets and watch as this flood washes your corpse down to its rightful place in the gutter.'" Caleb said conversationally. "Thing is, though, I’m currently livin’ in your head, and I’ve died before. Wasn’t so fun as I’d care to do it again. So, might I suggest that we take advantage of this fellow’s gawping and let me and mine solve this?”

There was a bang behind them and a sudden burst of bright light illuminated the alley way. Buffy was pretty sure the soldiers had just thrown a flashbang into the hotel room. She didn’t know whether Rudy had stopped it in time – it was entirely possible that the soldiers might soon be behind them too, and then Buffy was pretty sure they’d all be dead.

The man with the cloudy eye blinked, the bang enough to pull his attention back to the matter at hand. He stopped staring at Caleb and opened his mouth to give the order…

But Buffy was faster. “Do it.”

One of the soldiers buckled, a knife in her throat, blood spraying everywhere. Behind her loomed a figure in a cowl, with scars where its eyes should be. The other soldiers spun, opened fire, but the figure wasn’t solid. The bullets passed right through it, not touching it any more than the rain could. 

Its knife, however, was _very_ real, and it wasn’t alone. 

The man with the cloudy eye wiped some blood off his face, growled, and strode towards Buffy.

“Now, now. None of that,” Caleb wagged a finger. “This one’s mine. Staked my claim a long time ago.”

The man with the cloudy eye ignored him. Caleb sighed, curled his fingers into a fist, and struck the other man like the hammer of God. Well, the hammer of something, at least.

It shouldn’t have connected. Shouldn’t have been able to do anything. He wasn’t there, wasn’t _solid_.

It shouldn’t have bent the other man in half and send him rocketing backwards.

But then, it didn’t really seem to be the kind of day when things happened the way they should.


	10. Chapter Ten

You look down at her, the young brunette in the slinky little dress which hints at every damn thing. It’s disgusting, it really is. She’s looking at you, a man of God, like you’re her own personal saviour while she goes and dresses like that. It makes you feel sick to your stomach. The only thing that saves you from puking right then and there is the weight of your knife, and the knowledge that it’ll soon be deep enough in her belly that you’ll be able to forget about yours.

“I had to see you, Preacher. I heard your sermon and it was… well, I ain’t ever heard anything like that. Was like you picked me clean out of the crowd, and you were speakin’ straight to me.” 

“Well now, that’s always nice to hear. I do so love it when people listen,” you flash her a smile and her response is like a sunrise. It’s matched by a rush of bile in your throat. Sickening, is what she is. “People so often don’t. It’s like there’s nothing between their ears save for prattle.”

“Oh, _yes_,” she breathes, and you know that you’ll have to put a stop to that. “Your words have a power, Preacher.”

“That they surely do. After all, people need to hear the truth about themselves. They’ve been wallowin’ in the dirt for so long they don’t see it for what is, can’t even recognise that the filth that stains their grubby little souls. They need someone to open their eyes.”

Her expression goes blank. She can’t smile and think at the same time. “What, Preacher? I don’t understand.”

You smile again and pat her on the shoulder. Your skin crawls at the feeling of her skin on yours – you’re going to have to scrub yourself later, this is messy already. Even so, you’re rewarded by the return of her smile. And it _is_ a reward, this time. It means that she’s smiling as the knife slides into her. 

You feel the warmth of the blood that is her life as it tumbles out of her. You can feel it radiate out from her like a furnace. It’s on your skin, washing away the dirt, washing away every little thing. You’re pure, you realise. In a world of people who don’t know they’re sinners, the person who knows he’s evil is the only one who’s sane. 

Her life’s leaving her, you can see it in her eyes – you wrap your fingers in her hair and hold her up when her knees buckle just so that you can watch it fade away. 

The moment ends all too soon, as it always does, and you watch the corpse drop bonelessly at your feet.

At the same time, you hear something behind you, and you whirl around, knife held high. Anyone who witnessed your little baptism in blood is going to have front row seats for an encore.

You suppose that the things standing behind you might possibly count as people, but if they do they sure as hell don’t count as witnesses. For one thing, they don’t have eyes, just scars where they should be.

You frown. “This isn’t right. You shouldn’t be here, not now. You didn’t come along until later.”

They just stand there, still as statues. If they’re breathing, you can’t tell.

“Well? Any of you got anything to share with the class? I know the devil’s got all y’all tongues, but that don’t mean you can’t speak if you’ve got a mind to. I’ve heard you speak, words lapping away in my skull like waves of darkness.”

They just stand there, still as statues. If they’re breathing, you can’t tell.

There’s a sound behind you, slow and deliberate. Footsteps. You spin around, ready to strike down the person who has invaded your head and is messing around with your memories. You’re ready to strike, and-

Buffy slumped to the ground. She could feel something running down her face, but she wasn’t sure if it was the rain, or tears, or blood, or something else entirely. In fact, she wasn’t even sure if it was her face. For all she knew, if she reached up and touched it she’d find that it belonged to someone else entirely.

Her head hurt. It felt as though her brain had expanded to fill every inch of her skull, as though there was an incredible pressure building inside her head and at any moment she might just burst. The only upside that she could think of was that it might not actually be _her_ head.

Buffy opened her eyes and blearily saw someone peering down at her. Their name was on the tip of her tongue. _Emily_, she thought – but no, she’d killed Emily, years and years ago, and besides, the face didn’t belong to a woman. _David_, that was it. She was almost sure of that, which was a lot surer than she was about pretty much anything else.

“Are you okay?”

His voice echoed in her ears, or _someone’s_ ears, at least. Then it occurred to her that it might well have been heard by her own ears and someone else’s, and that was why it was echoing in the first place. She was listening with too many ears. She should do something about that, but she couldn’t think what that might be. She could barely think at all – the pain in the head that, for lack of a better term, is usually considered hers was excruciating.

“I have no idea,” Buffy said. The voice was hers. It went with the image of her face that she had in her head. But it still sounded weird, as though it was coming from the wrong lips – she sounded like she did in recordings, in fact, and not at all like she sounded when she was speaking in her own head. “I’m not even entirely sure who _I_ am.”

Then she frowned. “Why are you grabbing my ankle?”

David looked puzzled. “I’m not.”

“Whose ankle are you holding, then?”

“I’m not-

Caleb looked down at the figure who’d just grabbed his leg. He’d just hit the man with the cloudy eye, hit him so hard that he he’d been airborne for several seconds, and had slid about six feet down the slippery sidewalk once he’d hit the ground again.

Then the man had had the temerity to try standing up. Most people that Caleb hit weren’t so good with the getting up – in fact, they usually had too much trouble breathing to do much of anything else. This one, though, just looked a bit winded. That wasn’t right. Wasn’t right at all.

He’d never had much truck with people who didn’t stay down. It was one of the problems that he had with Dracula, besides the whole thing about him being an evil bloodsucking vampire and all. You could put a stake in him and moments later he’d be swirling around again, ready with his mojo.

So Caleb had stalked over to the other man and was about to kick him hard enough to make sure that he didn’t get up again, and he’d gone and grabbed Caleb’s leg.

That wasn’t how this sort of thing was supposed to go. He was incorporeal, the rain was falling right through him – he was only as solid as he needed to be. But this man had seen him, clear as day, and now he’d managed to lay his hands on him. 

He was trying to do something inside his head, too. Caleb could feel him scrabbling away at his mind. Oddly enough, it seemed like whatever mental assault he was going for was coming at him through one of his eyes. There was something burrowing in his socket, worming its way in towards his brain. His vision was going dark, and he’d be damned if he wasn’t finding it difficult to move.

Caleb, moving at a speed that would be mocked by glaciers, lifted his other foot. “You want to crawl your way into my skull? You want to see what I’ve got in there? Well, I’ve had something in there that makes you look like a picnic, and if you don’t stop you might just wake it up.”

Caleb had his foot hovering above the other man’s head now. He might not win a race with a snail, but it wasn’t like the other man’s head was going anywhere. Caleb had plenty of practice stomping on worms.

“You seen it yet?” Caleb spat. “Got a whole world in my head. All things dark and dead.”

The man with the cloudy eye didn’t respond. He just gritted his teeth, and the pressure in Caleb’s head began to grow. Black fluid, darker than night, began to ooze out of his eye.

\- holding anyone’s ankle,“ David said.

Buffy blinked, hand flying up to find check that her eye was still there, that there wasn’t someone drilling through it to get to her brain. She managed to find that her eye was in fact still there, and it didn't seem leaking anything, but the jury was still out on whether someone was drilling into it. Something was definitely happening, and whatever it was just didn’t feel right.

“Help me up,” Buffy said. David gripped her arm and pulled her upwards.

The Bringers were gone, or at the very least they weren’t visible anymore. The soldiers, though, were definitely still around. They were _very_ dead. Nothing could have lost that much blood and still be alive.

Over in the distance, though, was the man with the cloudy eye, hands wrapped around one of Caleb’s legs. Caleb was frozen in an improbable position, one leg hovering just above the other man’s head.

“We should go,” Syd said urgently. 

“No.” Buffy let go of David’s arm and stood on her own feet. Besides a moment of almost crippling vertigo, she managed that just fine.

“What do you mean, no? If we don’t leave now, more soldiers will show up. We need to run, or else-“ Syd stopped talking.

The reason that Syd had stopped talking was because of the knife currently being held against her throat. “Of course _you_ want to run,” Buffy spat. “Want to crawl away on your belly like a bug. Can’t stand with your head held high, not when the _stench_ of your filth is fillin’ your nostrils. Run or die, that’s the only options you give yourself. Well, I’m tellin’ you now – here, in this place, it’s run _and_ die.”

David took a step back. Throughout this whole thing he’d looked stunned, confused, bewildered and baffled. Now he just looked determined. “Buffy, put down the knife.”

“Why would I go and do a thing like that?”

There was a bang and flash of blinding light as lightning struck – and David raised his hand and _caught_ the bolt. In his hand was something brighter than the sun, brighter than anything except for his eyes which glittered yellow in the reflected light. “Put. Down. The. Knife.”

Buffy instinctively clamped her eyes shut, keeping out that blinding glare. In the darkness, playing across the back of her eyelids, something was moving... something that was rearing back to strike at her.

A familiar feeling began wriggling through her eye, the same painful pressure that Caleb had felt. Was in fact still feeling, burrowing into his mind. She could feel that, just as clearly as she could feel it in her own body.

Come to think of it, which one _was_ her body? She wasn’t Caleb, was she? How could she tell? She could feel his knife in her hand. He’d used to it to kill a half dozen girls before he’d gotten careless and damaged it on someone’s rib. She remembered the blood and the screams and the way they’d begged, the almost religious ecstasy as he’d killed them anyway. She remembered all of that. They were her memories.

Was she sure she wasn’t Caleb?

Was Caleb sure he wasn’t Buffy?

Whose mind was being attacked right now?

She wasn’t even sure that it mattered. Whoever she was, Buffy, Caleb, both, neither – her/his/their head(s) was/were going to explode.

Buffy dropped the knife. It vanished before it even hit the floor. “Get out of my head! Get out get out get out! There’s too much in here, I can’t take it, I can’t, I _can’t_…”

But the pressure just kept building in her head. Something began to leak from her eyes, ooze down her cheeks, but she couldn’t wipe it away. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t _think_. There was nothing but the cloud where her mind should be. 

Down the street, the man with the cloudy eye stood up, and began moving towards them with slow, deliberate footsteps.


	11. Chapter Eleven

There was a cloud.

Well. Maybe that wasn’t the right way of putting it. To say that there was a cloud suggested that there might well be things that _weren’t_ cloud. There wasn’t.

So then. There was a cloud, and the cloud was everything that there was.

There was a cloud, and in it, something was moving.

~*~

In the cloud, something became aware. Not aware of anything in particular. There wasn’t anything to be aware _of_. There was cloud, and that was it. But the thing in the cloud, the thing that _was_ cloud, realised that there were bits of cloud that wasn’t the same as it was. The thing in the cloud remembered other times, when the world was different.

There had _been_ a world, for starters.

And so, working from memories as insubstantial as dreams, the thing fashioned itself a body. It was the kind of body that would make a stick figure look hyper-realistic, and it was as insubstantial as the cloud that it was made out of, but it was a start.

The figure looked down at itself, and wondered what its name was. It looked around, and saw nothing but cloud. There was nothing but cloud to see.

Something drifted across what, for lack of a better word, we must call the figure’s mind. It turned out to be a word.

_Breathe._

Breathing was important. It remembered that. Some things didn’t breathe, and the things that didn’t breathe tended to be dead. It remembered being dead – nothing, not even the end of the world, could make it forget that – and it felt sure that it wasn’t dead. Not right then. It was sure of that.

Well. Mostly sure. Dead things don’t normally end up in a cloud that was a world. They don’t usually end up _anywhere_.

Still, the thing hollowed out its chest, scraped a trachea out of the thing that passed for its neck. It breathed, inexpertly. The cloud in its lungs floated out, past the great gaping maw in its face, and into the cloud that was the world.

If it had been capable of being surprised, it would have been surprised to see the cloud form words that danced against the backdrop of the cloud that was the world.

_YOU DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE. BUT YOU KNOW THIS. THERE WAS A BATTLE. YOU LOST. NOW YOU ARE DYING._

Did it know that? It supposed that it did. It nodded, or at least bobbed up and down in a jerky parody of a nod. 

_NOW YOU MUST RUN. RUN FAR, RUN SO FAR AWAY THAT THEY CAN NEVER FIND YOU. RUN, AND MAYBE YOU CAN SURVIVE._

If it had been able to, it would have frowned. Run from what? There was nothing here. Nothing but it, and the cloud that was the world. 

The words were fading now, and even though it took another breath, it couldn’t make them come back.

But, before they faded for good, they had time for one last message.

_look behind you_

The thing turned. It hadn’t been built for turning. It hadn’t been built to _move_. It turned so slowly that it began to think that it had been made to _dread_, because it was doing an excellent job at that. It knew, deep in the bones that it didn’t have, that it did _not_ want to see what was behind it.

But eventually it did turn, and it saw, and it didn’t understand.

It saw an eye. The eye was vast, far bigger than it was. It was an eye, with an eyelid, and eyelashes, and a pupil that was a dark jagged tear in reality, a space that wasn’t there, a _void_, a vacuum that was warping the cloud that was the world just by existing.

The eye was coming towards it. The eye wasn’t floating, wasn’t moving in weird, jerky, stop-motion movements like it did itself. Its eyelashes were working like legs, little, spindly legs that shouldn’t have been able to hold up the massive bulk that was the eye. But they did, and it was moving towards her.

The eye blinked, and emblazoned across the eyelid was a smile, a grin with too many teeth and not enough mirth. 

The figure started to run. It wasn’t good at it. It hadn’t been built for running. It hadn’t been built for anything, except possibly to dread.

Behind it, there was a laugh, a dark chuckle that echoed and rebounded in ways that no laugh should. Especially in a world in which there was nothing to rebound _from_. There was a laugh, and it sounded like the death of worlds.

It ran, and the eye followed.

It didn’t know where it was running to. As far as it knew, there was nowhere to go. There was the cloud that was the world, and there was the eye, and there was it, and that was all there was.

It remembered that it had once been part of the cloud, that it hadn’t had a body and had never needed to run. It tried to break apart, to stop being a body, but it couldn’t remember how. 

There was so much that it couldn’t remember. 

It remembered that it had to run. It remembered that it wasn’t good at it, and the eye was crawling towards her on its spindly eyelashes, and it was fast, faster than it was, and it was going to die and the world was going to end-

There was a flash of heat from in front of it, and it instinctively threw up an arm to protect itself.

Its arm evaporated, burning away in a single moment. Pain flashed through it like a lightning bolt. It felt as though there was a fire inside it, as though it was so hot that it was disintegrating.

It was. Steam was wafting off of it. If it stayed where it was, it would evaporate. It was going to crumble away.

It stopped. In front of it was a featureless white space of scorching heat. It couldn’t continue running. To keep going was to die. To keep going was to _burn_.

It turned, and saw the eye. Its eyelashes were snapping back and forth like whips. It was moments away.

It looked at the eye, at the jagged, torn pupil that was the closest thing to oblivion that it could imagine. It heard the low chuckle, felt it vibrate deep within itself.

It took an unnecessary breath, and stepped backwards.

_Pain_, nothing but pain and heat and _fire_. It was burning away. It opened its mouth to scream, but it had no tongue, no lungs, no _mouth_. It had no form, no mind. It had nothing but its agony. And then-

Buffy rocketed upwards. Her head collided with something hard, but she barely noticed because she wasn’t entirely sure that she wasn’t on fire.

Her doubt wasn’t settled until she heard someone say “Ow.” She saw David rub his chin. That didn’t seem like the kind of thing that happened to people who were seconds away from being able to be used as a charcoal face mask.

She looked around. She was in a car. It took her a couple of moments to realise that she recognised it – she’d been sitting in the passenger seat before, carefully not looking at the complete and utter lack of hands that Rudy had on the wheel. She was in the back now, with David. Syd was driving, and Rudy was sitting shotgun. 

Buffy realised why Rudy wasn’t driving when he turned to face her. His eyes were red and puffy, so swollen that they were almost shut. Division Three must have gassed him, or used some sort of really over the top flashbang. “You’re awake! How are you feeling?”

That was always a difficult question for her, now even more than usual. “I… don’t know. What happened?”

“We were kind of hoping that you would tell us that.”

Buffy paused, trying to collect her thoughts. “The last thing I remember was… the man with the cloudy eye. He’d grabbed my ankle, and was trying to, I don’t know, force his way inside my head, or something.” That was technically true, she reflected. Of course, she wasn’t entirely sure if that had been her memory or Caleb’s. She discounted the whole thing about being a figure made out of cloud being chased by a giant eyeball, because that hadn’t been her. Plus it sounded too much like something right out of a _really_ bad acid trip to share.

“So you don’t remember wiping out some of Division Three’s finest?” Rudy asked.

“What? Me? I mostly remember clutching my head and screaming, to be honest. I’d think I’d remember if I killed someone.” She always had before.

“Only they had me beat, and from what these two said they were about three seconds away from turning you into Swiss cheese, when suddenly a bunch of shadows with really sharp knives turned up and started slicing and dicing. I know it wasn’t me, Syd says she can’t do that sort of thing, and David-“

“It wasn’t me,” David interrupted. Buffy thought he sounded rather less certain about that than he would have liked.

Buffy squinted at David. “Didn’t you catch a lightning bolt? I didn’t imagine that, did I?”

“I think I… I might have done that.” David looked sheepish. “I mean, I remember doing it, but it felt like I was doing it in a dream, you know? Like when you’re dreaming and you can do anything? It didn’t really feel like _me_ doing it. If that makes sense.”

It did to Buffy.

“Your voice changed,” Syd said suddenly. “Buffy. Your voice changed. It was harsh, and… southern. Like you were someone else.”

“Uh huh. That would have been Caleb.”

“Who’s Caleb?” Everyone asked, almost in unison.

“He’s a serial killer who, when the origin of all evil came knocking, decided to becomes its groupie.”

“And you sounded like him… why?”

“Cary says I’m picking up things from a version of myself in a different universe through the Astral Plane.” Buffy shrugged. “Apparently I’m, like, a universal antenna or something.”

David looked at Rudy. “Was that supposed to make sense?”

“I guarantee that Cary will explain it better,” Rudy replied.

“Well _excuse_ me. Theory girl I am not.” 

“And Cary is who exactly?” David prompted.

“I, uh… Cary will probably explain that better too.”

“What happened to the man with the cloudy eye anyway?” Buffy asked, changing the subject.

“Walter? He’s in the trunk,” Rudy said matter-of-factly.

Buffy blinked. She ran the sentence through her head. She reran it. “Uh, say that again?”

“Currently, he’s in the trunk. I’m busily trying to make sure he doesn’t escape. That’s why I’m not driving.”

“That, and the fact that you can hardly see,” Syd added.

“Yeah, that too.”

“His name is Walter?” Buffy asked incredulously.

“Yep.”

“And he’s in the trunk?”

“Yep.”

“Seriously?”

“Yep.”

“You know,” Buffy said, “I fully expected his name to be something like Zygon the Implacable or something.”

“Really? He’s just a mutant, not a character out of a comic book or anything like that.”

“He’s a creepy guy with a weird eye and a squad of military goons in tactical gear,” Buffy pointed out. “If that isn’t the sort of person who gets to be called something wacky, I don’t know what is.”

Rudy snorted. “Fair enough.”

“How did you know his name was Walter, anyway?”

“He used to be at Summerland. He got kicked out a little while after I arrived. He liked to hurt people,” Rudy said. “I guess it makes sense he ended up with Division Three.”

“And why do we think it’s a good idea to bring him back?”

“Walter was always good at tracking people down. Had a real knack for it. If we leave him out there, he _will_ find you, eventually.”

“You know,” David interjected, “I woke up this morning thinking I was schizophrenic, and the weirdest thing I had to deal with was the fact that my girlfriend can switch bodies with anyone she touches. Now it turns out we’re both mutants, Buffy’s a mutant who _literally_ has demons in her head, and we’re being chased by the government.”

Buffy nodded. “That’s the size and shape, yeah.” She paused for a moment. “Hold up, Syd does _what_ now?”


	12. Chapter Twelve

David was a bad passenger. He wouldn’t stop fidgeting. He unclicked his seatbelt, clicked it back in again, got halfway through unzipping his jacket and then changed his mind and zipped it right up to his chin. He looked out of his window, the front window, Buffy’s window – he even craned his head around to look out of the back.

Under other circumstances, Buffy probably wouldn’t even have noticed it. When Rudy had driven them from Summerland earlier, for example, she would’ve been too busy fidgeting herself to pay any attention to what David was doing. 

But Syd was a much more relaxing driver than Rudy had been, and besides, Buffy’s head hurt, her eyes hurt, and if it wasn’t for the fact that she was pretty much running on adrenaline fumes, she’d probably be asleep. She was _tired_, and David’s constant fidgeting was getting on her nerves.

He’d even fidgeted through Syd’s explanation of how her powers worked. Sure, he’d probably heard it before, but if anything was interesting enough to hold someone’s attention, Buffy would have thought that that was it. It was so _weird_. Buffy was familiar with body switching – she had some first-hand experience, in fact, having spent some time in Faith’s body – and it had never worked like Syd’s power. When Syd touched someone, they switched bodies. That was easy enough. But some time later, hours, minutes, maybe even a day, when the power wore off, the mind of the person that she’d switched with didn’t just snap back to its body. Wherever Syd, or rather, the body that had Syd’s mind in it was, that was where the body of the person that she’d switched with would go. The mind didn’t snap back to its body – the body snapped back to its mind.

Besides that odd quirk, Buffy couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if Syd touched her. Whose body would she end up in? Buffy wasn’t sure that she was _just_ Buffy. For one thing, even though Syd was probably the most qualified driver they had at the moment, there was still a small part of Buffy’s mind that wanted to shove her out of the car and take over. It was, she was sure, the lingering effect of having Caleb in her head. She could only hope that it would wear off in a bit, like it had with Giles, but in the mean time she really didn’t want Syd to touch her and then end up in Caleb’s body. Or have Caleb in Syd’s body. Or anything at all to do with Caleb, really.

And despite all of that, David was still fidgeting. It was enough to bother someone, it really was.

“You okay, David?” Buffy said. She’d meant to sound gentle, but she hadn’t quite managed it. It had come out as more of a snap. “You keep fidgeting,” she added, in a slightly softer tone.

“Yes. No. Yes. No. I mean,” David braided his fingers together on his lap, “I wanted to know, I, uh, wanted to ask… is this real? Is any of this real?”

Buffy almost wished that Kerry was around. There was something about having a girl with a katana answering questions that made them seem definitively answered. Besides, that girl could give a blunt yes better than anyone that she’d ever met. Buffy, on the other hand, had never felt that she was qualified to answer questions about what was and wasn’t real. There was too much overlap.

Still, she gave it her best shot. “Pretty sure, yeah. I think so. I mean, it’s pretty weird, but if we start doubting it then we just open ourselves to more of the weird, and that way madness lies. And we’ve already done that. We’ve been down that road. So, anyway, yeah. I think this is probably real.” Buffy internally cringed. Her best shot had been much better when she’d been a Slayer. She could have handled this whole thing without any issue, then.

David nodded slowly. “Uh huh. Right. Sure.” 

He sounded doubtful, as though something was still bothering him, but at least he wasn’t fidgeting anymore. Buffy counted that as a win. Sure, she supposed that she should probably talk to him, ask him what was still bothering him, but she felt like the top of her skull had been lifted off and molten metal had been pounded into her brain. If he was going to do something as patently dumb as questioning reality rather than something sensible like whether he might suddenly open up a great big chasm in the ground or catch a lightning bolt, then that was his fault. Buffy had had enough.

Buffy lay back in her seat and closed the boiled orbs that passed for her eyes. If her history was anything to go by, then there was a good chance that she wouldn’t actually be able to sleep, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t give it a go. 

“You’re going to miss things if you’re asleep, you know,” a voice said in her ears. Buffy frowned, but didn’t open her eyes. The voice was vaguely familiar – male, American – but it didn’t belong to Rudy or David, which meant that she could safely ignore it. She had more than enough going on in her head without adding yet another person that didn’t exist to it.

“Fine, ignore me if you want. It’ll be your funeral.”

The voice really was annoyingly familiar. It was soft and smooth and didn’t really hold a hint of the threat that had been implicit to the words. She just couldn’t place it. It wasn’t Xander, wasn’t Angel, wasn’t Riley. Wasn’t someone she knew that well at all, she suspected. A casual acquaintance, then? 

“If you go through life with your eyes closed, you won’t see things that are right in front of you,” the voice said. “Sounds trite, I know, but I think it’s worth saying. You’ve had enough trouble with eyes, recently, but you’ll have just as many problems if you avoid them altogether.”

Buffy really couldn’t care less what the voice was saying. It sounded like cryptic gibberish to her. It was the sort of thing that the people in her head often said. She hadn’t had the patience for them when she was the Slayer, and she definitely didn’t have the patience for them now. The things that the voice was saying weren’t important. If she were so inclined, she could definitely just go to sleep while it droned at her. She’d done that with other voices enough times over the years. The words weren’t important, but the fact that the voice was simultaneously familiar and yet unknown was incredibly irritating. If her head wasn’t a short step away from being a furnace, she was sure she’d be able to recognise it – as it was, though, there was no chance of that, and there’d be no chance of sleep either. She’d just keep wondering whose voice it was. 

So, really, there was no option other than to open her eyes. So she did.

Though there was space for someone to sit between her and David, no one was. There was no one in the car who shouldn’t be there.

There was, however, someone outside her window. On a scale of one to demon, it was way up there. It had bumpy, yellow-green skin that was only a short step away from being scales, curly horns like a ram, ears like a bat and an oddly small nose under heavy brows and above a mouth full of small, needle-like teeth.

That wasn’t all that weird, though. She’d seen demons that would make this thing look like a Barbie doll. It wasn’t even weird that this thing sounded like your average American, even though it looked like it should have a voice like a deep, rolling evil thing. She was familiar with that too.

The weird thing was that, even though the car was speeding along the highway, this demon was just walking alongside the car. He didn’t look like he was moving all that quickly – in fact, he looked like he was just taking a leisurely stroll – but he was still effortlessly keeping pace with the car. It was surprisingly difficult to watch.

Willow had once pointed out that the things in her head sometimes worked like characters in badly rendered video games. There were things like this, or Caleb essentially clipping through the car earlier. It hadn’t made her feel any better.

She didn’t even recognise the demon, which made the whole thing with the eye opening and the being awake completely pointless. Though Buffy had seen a lot of demons, she hadn’t thought that she had seen all that many that were as demon-y as this one. If she’d recognised the voice, she would have thought that she’d recognise the nightmarish face that went with it. But she didn’t.

Buffy didn’t ask him what his name was. She didn’t want to speak. For one thing, speaking was a thing that involved effort, and that so wasn’t the thing she felt that she could have right then. For another, there was a bunch of other people in the car and, even though they knew that she had literal demons in her head, that didn’t mean that she felt the need to go around talking to them in front of them. So she just looked at the demon and hoped that the aching muscles in her face were capable of making her look quizzical.

The demon rolled his eyes in a surprisingly human gesture. “Mark. You really don’t remember me, do you? We worked together for a while. It’s Mark.”

Buffy’s eyes narrowed. Sure, sometimes demons had oddly human names. Not everyone could be called something like Zygon the Implacable. But there seemed to be something odd about that. Maybe there was something on the face that looked like it was built for snarling that made her think that he was lying. Maybe it was whatever part of her that recognised his voice, trying to give her a warning.

But she was tired, and he had nothing to do with the creeping darkness that leaked in with Caleb’s thoughts, so she decided that she didn’t care. Let him lie, if he felt he needed to.

“We’re here,” Rudy said suddenly, squinting. “Or at least I think we’re here.”

Buffy looked ahead. Sure enough, there was Summerland ahead. “Yup.”

David looked like Buffy had, when she’d first arrived. He, too, was surprised that this place was the headquarters for an underground organisation of mutants. “Wow.”

“There’s no cherry pie, though,” Buffy remarked drily as she awkwardly slid out of the car.

Summerland’s doors flew open, and Melanie rushed down the steps. Apparently they were rolling the welcome wagon out for David. Which made sense – he only collapsed buildings and caught lightning bolts. He didn’t accidently destroy boats.

Mark sidled up to her. “He’s craving more than cherry pie, that boy.”

Buffy blinked, dragging scratchy eyelids over parched eyeballs. That had sounded ominous. She knew ominous when she heard it, was in fact an expert in ominousity, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why someone wanting something other than cherry pie could be ominous. She was way too tired for this.

It was only because she was so tired that she made the mistake of asking “What are you talking about?”

Mark snorted. “Look at him! Look! Don’t you have _eyes_? The way he stands, the way he moves. The way his eyes flit from thing to thing. Everything he does screams hunger, and-“

“When you said we worked together – what exactly did we do?” Buffy interrupted. She didn’t feel like she’d ever worked with Mark. While she had worked with demons before, even demons demonier than he was, something about this particular demon just seemed far too villainous.

“Therapist,” Mark said shortly.

“Of course.”

“Anyway, if I can continue,” Mark said acidly, “the boy wants to be loved. Look at the way he stands so close to Syd. She shies away, curves away from him, but he’s tilted towards her. He asks if any of this is real, and he thinks that he’s talking about mutants and psychics and shadows with knives – he thinks that with such intensity that you think it too. But he’s really asking if there can be people who care.”

He might be right – Buffy couldn’t tell. Even after all the time she’d spent in Clockworks, she was far from an expert in human psychology, but demons she knew. Demons she knew, and this one in particular looked like he’d just seen a snack had just ambled over and plonked itself down in front of him. She’d rarely seen anyone look quite as hungry as he did.

And just like that, she realised where she’d heard Mark’s voice before. She hadn’t recognised him before because when she’d seen him, he’d looked different. 

For one thing, he’d been a robot.

“A therapist? Did you really think I’d buy that? _Moloch_.”

“It was worth a shot,” Moloch replied, drawing thin lips over needle-like teeth in a grotesque parody of a smile. “Besides, it doesn’t make what I said any less true. If he could hear me… oh, the things I could do with that boy.”

“Yeah, no. _So_ don’t want to hear about that.”

Still, Buffy steeled herself to hear him anyway. She’d never had much luck with getting people to not talk to her. Drugs had helped, a little – it had made the more violent people like Caleb or Angelus much easier to deal with – but she didn’t have any of those.

Thankfully, she was spared when Melanie turned to her. “Cary’s ready for you, by the way.”

“Already?” Buffy said in surprise. “We’ve only been gone a few hours.”

Melanie shrugged, and looked back at David and Syd. “Anyway, we’ll give you a tour, and once P-“

Buffy put her hand on David’s shoulder. “Hey. I’ll see you later, ‘kay? I’ve just got to go do a thing.”

David’s answering smile, though wavery and uncertain, was like the sun coming up.


	13. Chapter Thirteen

When Buffy left to find Cary, Rudy was floating the mutant apparently known as Walter out of the trunk of the car. Despite having spent a few hours being held immobile in the trunk of a car after brawling in the rain, and currently being hovered telekinetically a few inches above the ground with his arms pinned to his sides, Walter didn’t seem to mind too much. Generally, when stuff like that happened to villains, they would rant and rave about how no prison could hold them, they would have their revenge, you’ll see, you’ll _all_ see, blah blah blah. Walter just had a faint smile, as though this was only a mild inconvenience.

Buffy didn’t like that. Summerland wasn’t a prison – it definitely didn’t seem to be the kind of place that could hold someone who could take a punch from _Caleb_ and get up like it was nothing. Besides, Buffy had encountered things that felt like creepy-crawlies had wriggled into her skull before. Things that did that were usually powerful demons. Or worse. While walls might be good for a lot of things, holding things like that wasn’t one of them.

Of course, if it had been up to Buffy, she probably would plucked out his cloudy eye and gutted him like a fish, but then she wasn’t exactly in her right mind. That seemed like Caleb thinking, and the fact that it made sense to her and felt _right_ was not a thing that was good.

Still, there wasn’t a lot that she could do about it. Maybe Summerland had some place where they put evil mutants. Maybe Cary, who could apparently whip up something to stop her from getting entangled with Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a matter of hours, could make something that could stop someone from boring into people's heads with the psychic equivalent of a drill, scooping out minds and chucking them into the trash.

Moloch chuckled behind her, low and dark, to show her what he thought of that.

“Oh, shut up,” Buffy snapped.

The laughter stopped, as if Moloch actually cared what Buffy thought. At the same time, the temperature of the room dropped like a stone.

“What did you say?” Moloch said. His voice was flat, and he almost managed to keep the tension out of it.

Buffy exhaled, steam billowing from her mouth. She shivered – she wasn’t dressed for this. It was summer, a lovely day. There was no reason to suddenly feel like she’d taken a stroll across the arctic tundra.

She glanced at Moloch. His face was blank, and in any case it wasn’t exactly made for nuanced expression. As far as she could remember, which admittedly wasn’t all that far, Moloch didn’t have any power over the temperature. He talked at people and, if he happened to be a robot, he could manipulate anything with an internet connection, but making the room do a reasonable impression of an ice cube? That wasn’t him.

Of course, she _was_ inside. Summerland probably had some sort of air conditioning. Maybe Moloch had messed with it. But, with frost spreading like spider webs across the windows, Buffy couldn’t imagine that Summerland was built to get this cold. Even if Moloch had done something – and it was a big if – he couldn’t make a machine do something that it wasn’t designed to do. 

Probably.

“I said shut up.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought you said.” Moloch’s eyes darted around the room. Though his voice was calm, it was obvious that he was trying to keep his cool. He didn’t know what was going on any more than she did. “Well, in that case, I’d better… go.” And he did. One moment he was there, looming as large as a giant demon could when they didn’t really exist, and the next he was gone, as if he hadn’t ever been there.

Buffy, teeth chattering against the cold, hurried onto the next room. Looked like a cold snap a day kept the hallucinations away. She almost wished that she could think of that as a good thing. 

Still, as Buffy moved onwards, it seemed as though the cold was confined to that specific room. Maybe it was haunted, or something. Freezing everything in sight seemed like a ghostly thing to her.

A few moments later, when she was outside Cary’s lab, she paused to rub some life into her hands. She would have liked to have done something with her hair and not be wearing damp, rain-soaked clothes as well, but she couldn’t always get what she wanted. She took a deep breath, let it out, noted with some satisfaction that it didn’t result in a plume of steam, and went in.

Cary looked up from a mess of wires on his desk. “Buffy! You’re back.”

“Really? How could you tell?” Buffy shook her head to clear it. “Sorry. As days go, this one has had a lot of not goodness in it.”

“Well, I think I have something that might help with that,” Cary said. He wheeled himself out from under his desk and then poled himself along with this cane until he was sitting opposite Buffy. “But I wanted to ask first – how are your eyes?”

Buffy frowned, and her hand involuntarily twitched, moving upwards to her face before she realised that, besides feeling scratchy and dry, there was nothing wrong with her eyes. At least nothing that wouldn’t be fixed by a night’s sleep. “My eyes? My eyes are fine. Why?”

“Rudy called while you were… unconscious. He wanted to let us know that he was bringing Walter, and he also mentioned that your eyes were… well, _black_, and leaking some sort of fluid.” Cary looked up at her, concerned.

Buffy opened her mouth to ask what he was talking about – if she’d been leaking some kind of black fluid, she’d have known about it. No one in the car had mentioned anything like that to her, either. Plus, if she had been leaking black ooze, then there’d still be some on her cheeks, and there definitely wasn’t.

Buffy opened her mouth to ask what he was talking about, but then she shut it again. There had been a moment, when she’d been Caleb, and Walter had stepped up his attack. She’d felt, or rather, _Caleb_ had felt that his head was about to burst, and there’d been something, a fluid like the darkness between the stars, had begun trickling from her eye as Walter’s attacked bore through it. But that had been Caleb. Caleb, who when he was killed, didn’t bleed, or at least didn’t bleed anything that was recognisable as blood. Caleb, who had got back up after being killed, with darkness running from black eyes.

That hadn’t been her. “My eyes are fine,” Buffy said. It was true. _Her_ eyes _were_ fine.

Cary looked like he was about to ask if she was sure, which would have led to some sort of temper tantrum which would have started with Cary being pushed off his chair and escalated from there, but he seemed to pick up on Buffy’s mood and wisely didn’t continue that line of thought. “Good, good, that’s good to hear,” he muttered absently as he scooted back over to his desk and began rummaging around for something. While he was looking, Buffy sat down. Standing was not a thing that she wanted to do more of. “Anyway, I made you something. As I said before, I think you’ve gotten entangled with an alternate version of yourself, and instead of manifesting psychic powers directly you’re coming at it from a different angle. I’ve got you something that should focus you on the here and – oh, Kerry, where did I put it?” Buffy briefly thought he was talking to himself, before she realised that he was probably talking to his alter-ego. She should probably talk to him about that at some point. She wanted to know how he managed to keep himself straight. Or themselves. Or whatever. She couldn’t even manage it in her own head. 

“Ah, here it is!” Cary said triumphantly, holding something aloft.

It was definitely something. What it was _not_, though, was something that Buffy had expected. She’d thought it might be some kind of helmet with wires dangling from it, or perhaps a little beeping circlet. This, however, didn’t look like a machine at all. It definitely didn’t look like something that helped sort out dimensional entanglements.

What it looked like was a nightcap, the sort of thing that Buffy had often seem people wearing in old-timey cartoons. It was long, it had a bobble on the end of it, it was neon green, and it was hideous.

Buffy waited, thinking that surely this couldn’t be it, it had to be something that Cary had in his desk for… well, she couldn’t imagine why, but there was no way that she was going to wear this shapeless sock thing on her head, especially not when it was that colour. It had to be Cary’s. It had to be.

But Cary was looking at her expectantly, and he was holding it out for her.

“Cary,” Buffy said slowly, “please tell me I’m not supposed to wear that – that _thing_.”

Cary looked taken aback. “Well, _yes_. Is something wrong with it?”

“Ask Kerry. I bet she’d get it. Come on, Cary. I’ve seen things covered in puke that look better than that thing.”

“I suppose it is a bit green,” Cary sheepishly admitted.

“A _bit_ green? It’s so green that if it was at a junction, people would confuse it for a green light!”

Cary reached in and turned it inside out, revealing complicated looking machinery, complete with flashing lights. It looked slightly more like Buffy had expected Cary’s machine to look. It also looked like a high-tech Christmas tree. “It needs to be something that you can sleep in. The Astral Plane is at least tangentially related to dreams and, in any case, it needed to be something that you could wear for a least a few days. It will probably take about 48 hours before you’re properly grounded. A helmet would be too uncomfortable, and I needed to fit more machinery in this thing than would really be feasible with a headband.” Cary looked embarrassed. “Plus this is the only nightcap I could find.”

“Cary, why do you have a nightcap that looks like that?”

“I’m… not sure. I assume it was a gift.” Cary said. Buffy got the distinct impression that Cary, or possibly Kerry, had found it just as disgusting as she did, and had never worn it. It made her feel better for about half a second, until she remembered that _she_ was supposed to wear it herself. She was wearing a rejected nightcap that looked like it was soaked in really weird demon blood. She couldn’t believe that that had been dyed by anything natural.

“It’s not so bad-“

“I’m pretty sure that thing would eat my brain,” Buffy said. “Either that or make everyone around me go blind. Or roll on the floor laughing at the poor fashion victim. The point is, that thing? Not a good hat. I’m not wearing that thing.”

~*~

Buffy had never been to Summerland’s cafeteria. She’d planned to, but what with crashing out as soon as she arrived and then rushing out to get David not long after waking up, she hadn’t had the time. She’d had to make do with food that Rudy had grabbed for the road.

She’d never been in the cafeteria, which was a shame, because if she’d been there before, then people would have seen her, and they’d know that she didn’t always wear neon green nightcaps to dinner. But she hadn’t, and they didn’t. 

Thankfully, it wasn’t a meal time, so there weren’t all that many people, but not many people was still _way_ too many. Sure, this might be a building filled with mutants, but until the day that there was a mutant who had a head like a neon green nightcap, she wasn’t going to be reassured by that.

It didn’t help that wearing the cap felt wiggy. For one thing, it made her feel heavy, as though the air was thicker and it was weighing her down. When she waved her hand, though, it moved just like it should. For another, she felt like her depth perception was a little off, like she couldn’t quite work out how far away things were. Cary had said that it would pass, but it was still a bit unnerving.

So Buffy got her food and sat by herself. At least she was used to that. Years of life in a psychiatric hospital would do that for you. She didn’t even have Willow or Xander around, like she had back at Sunnydale High.

Buffy was therefore taken completely by surprise by someone sliding into the seat across from her. It was a woman, brunette, probably in her mid-thirties, though she looked older because of her hard expression. While she was wearing the muted greens and browns that seemed to be standard at Summerland, she was also wearing a bright red scarf. Sitting opposite Buffy, the pair probably looked like some off-duty Christmas elves or something. 

“Uh, hello,” Buffy ventured tentatively.

“Hi,” the woman replied. “Christina Claremont, Petty Officer First Class.”

Buffy blinked in surprise. “Okay. I’m Buffy. No rank.”

"Old habits. You can call me Chrissy.”

“Hi,” Buffy said again. “Uh, how are you?”

“Hungry. My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.” Chrissy smiled, as though she’d made a joke.

“Right, right,” Buffy said. She was hungry too, so hungry that she’d decided that she needed food more than she needed sleep. “So, you’re military?”

Chrissy nodded once, her hand moving up to check her scarf. “Yes. Or, rather I was. I was in the Navy, before all of this happened," she said sadly, spreading her hands, taking in Summerland and everything that came with it. 

Buffy recognised that tone of voice. She’d heard it before, from Slayers, Watchers, even witches. It was the tone of voice of someone who had been doing they’d loved, had _been_ something that they’d loved, and then something had happened. They’d been Called, they’d seen the things that go bump in the night, whatever, and then they’d found that they couldn’t do it anymore. They’d had to become something else. Something they didn't like.

“I had a friend in the military once. Riley. He had… issues with the weirder side of things.” Technically true, although it had been demons and the stuff that went with them rather than mutants. “If you ever want to talk, you know?”

Chrissy’s eyes narrowed. “We’ve met before, you know.”

Buffy started. “Have we? When?”

“I’m not surprised you don’t remember me. I was wearing different clothes. You didn’t even see my face. I was just a faceless goon in a squad of faceless goons.” Chrissy reached up and began unwinding her scarf. “I was military. I _was_.” She pulled the scarf away.

Her throat had been sliced open. There was a jagged tear, and blood was bubbling and oozing down her neck. Buffy was sure that she could even see bone.

“I was military,” Chrissy said, throat popping and hissing in ways that no throat should. “I was, until a thing with scars for eyes took a knife to my throat.”


	14. Chapter Fourteen

Buffy watched as a thin stream of blood trickled down the curve of Chrissy’s neck with the inevitability of an oil spill. She watched as the wound in her throat bubbled and hissed with every laboured breath. She watched, and all she could think was that she wasn’t afraid.

She _should_ be, she knew. Talking to someone with a gaping hole in their neck was enough to make anyone freak out.

Of course, she had memories in her head that were worse than this. She’d seen dead people before, and dead demons. She’d seen literal knights in shining armour cut almost in half by a sword that was in her hand, a sword that she’d used. She’d seen a lot of things, and though this was definitely creepy, it had nothing compared to some of that other stuff. 

But, then again, those weren’t her memories. Buffy the Vampire Slayer might never have known if she was going to live through any given night, but she had known that she was the Slayer. That sort of stuff went with the territory. Buffy, though, wasn’t the Slayer, no matter what the voices in her head said. She wasn’t sure, wasn’t certain, and definitely wasn’t the sort of person who could see someone with no throat to speak of without going into a major wig.

But she wasn’t afraid.

She leant forward. “How dumb do you think I am?”

Surprised flickered over Chrissy’s face, and her fingers tightened. Her knuckles were very white against the red of the scarf. “What?”

“Did you think that I’d see you and I’d fall all over myself saying sorry? Did you think I’d wail and scream and beat my chest in despair? ‘Cause let me tell you, if you thought that, you don’t know me at all.” Buffy said quietly.

“You killed me,” Chrissy said simply. “You killed all of us. You killed us because we’re human and you aren’t, and now-“

“See, the thing is, even though I’m cutting this food with this knife,” Buffy said, waving the cutlery that came with the cafeteria meal, “even though I can feel it against my skin and I _know_ it’s just a dull little knife, well – sometimes I almost fool myself into thinking it’s not. Sometimes, when I look down, I think that I’ll see a different knife. A knife that doesn’t cut food so much as it cuts the flesh of them as is dirty.” Buffy smiled, her lips thin and tight and her eyes as cold as a crypt. “You follow?”

Chrissy looked disgusted. “The Eye told us that it was you we were tracking. We did our research. We’ve read your medical files, your transcripts, all of that. Everything that survived the fall of Clockworks. All of it said that you wouldn’t hurt a fly. Your mind’s so folded in on itself, so concerned with all the messed up stuff that goes on in it that you wouldn’t even think of it. Nothing outside of you is more threatening than the things inside your head. A danger to herself, the file said, but not to others.” Though her voice was quiet, measured, calm, it was nevertheless dripping with disdain. It was the voice of someone who could never be convinced that the person they were talking to could ever be recognised as a person. “Looks like they were wrong.”

The words dangled in the air until Buffy waved them away with a dismissive hand. “So we’re going to keep up this charade, are we? We’re going to sit here and chat and pretend that I don’t know what you are?”

“Oh, but we know what _I_ am, don’t we? I’m just your average human. Admittedly, I’m a bit deader than most people, but still. You’re the, the _thing_ that’s other.”

“Me? I’m just a girl. Of course if you were to cut me I’m not sure that I’d bleed. There might just be some black liquid, darker than night. Comes with the whole feeling like there’s an ocean of evil lapping against my brain, like there’s a powerful thing buried beneath my thoughts that’s gonna suck the world into a fiery oblivion. That sort of thing. Still, when you’ve got stuff like that going on in your head, and you’re stuck chatting to some little girl with a hole in their throat, you kind of figure out who you’re really talking to.” Buffy’s smile widened. “So, First, why don’t you stop hiding behind her face and come out and talk yourself?”

Chrissy opened her mouth to say something, and there was an expression lurking around the corners of her eyes which might have been-

But then Buffy heard footsteps coming up behind her, slow and deliberate, and she froze. She couldn’t be Caleb, couldn’t use words that bubbled up from some dark alien ocean. Not with real people. Someone could get hurt, and she doubted that it would be her.

So she schooled her face into at least an approximation of normalcy, and hoped that the smile on her face when she turned around wasn’t too predatory.

It was David. He wasn’t looking at Buffy – he was too occupied by his hands. Which was strange, because they weren’t doing anything more important than toying with the zipper on his jacket. “Hey, David,” Buffy said, almost wishing that her voice didn’t sound so tired or so harsh, “what’s up?”

“Um, hi, Buffy,” David replied, still not looking at her. “I, uh, I wanted to ask you a question.”

Buffy looked behind him, trying to see if Syd was around, and trying not to think that he wouldn’t be so diffident and uncertain if she took her fork and rammed it into his face a time or two. She didn’t see Syd, which was a shame, because if Syd was around she could have palmed this conversation off on her. Buffy could have left, and gone to bed, and hopefully wake up and not feel like her eyes were boiled eggs and her mind was all shadows and gloom.

Buffy sighed. “Fine. What did you want to ask?”

David smiled, suddenly all cheer, and moved around the table to sit in front of Buffy. For a moment, she didn’t think anything about that – but then she realised that Chrissy, or something dressed in Chrissy’s skin, had just been sitting there. Whether it had been the First or a mutant-hating goon, she had definitely seemed like the person who would stick around, if only to make Buffy’s life just that little bit more painful.

But she was gone, and there wasn’t even a hint of a red scarf to suggest that she had ever been there. There was just David. “I wanted to ask – I had a question about the – I want to know about the devils in your head.”

Buffy digested that. She wasn’t really sure how she could answer that, quite apart from the fact that it hadn’t been a question in the first place. She wasn’t Giles, or Willow, or even Dawn. She didn’t have built-in demon factoids at her fingertips. About the best that she could manage was telling him that most of them could be killed by a judicious application of sword. “What did you want to know?”

“What are they like?”

Buffy almost laughed despite herself, because she felt like she’d just had this conversation. “Well, let’s put this way… if you’ve got a torrent of evil rushing through your head, every second of every day, then you aren’t really going to be a good guy, are you? Demons are big on the world-ending and acts of unspeakable evil. You know, the kind of things that you’d expect a demon to do.”

David’s expression didn’t change. It obviously hadn’t been what he’d wanted to know, but it took several seconds and Buffy looking at her food before he spoke again. “What about their eyes?”

Buffy blinked, remembering an eye walking towards her with jagged oblivion in its gaze. “Why are you asking about eyes?”

“No reason,” David said, too quickly to be truthful. He fidgeted absently. “Only… when we were outside the motel. I saw this thing. When I caught the lightning bolt, and everything felt like a dream. I saw… something. A devil with yellow eyes.”

“Sounds like a vampire,” Buffy said automatically, before her mind caught up with what David had actually said. “Wait, what? You saw what?”

“It was tall. Taller than me, and it looked like it should have been fat, like there’s a huge roll of fat that comes down from where it’s chin should be and covers its neck. But it isn’t fat, and its arms are long and spindly and its fingers are long and spindly and…” David took a deep shuddering breath, and finished weakly with “Anyway, that’s what it looked like.”

Buffy realised two things. The first was that this was what David had wanted to tell her in the car. Sure, he probably _had_ wanted to know if any of this was actually real, but the driving force behind that question had been whether this _thing_ that he had seen was real. Whether there really was a devil with yellow eyes.

The second thing that was that David had started using the present tense part-way through his description. He’d switched tenses, and judging by his wide eyes, his sudden sharp breath and, most of all, the way his eyes kept flicking behind her as though he expected to see something there, he hadn’t _only_ seen that thing outside the motel.

“I’m not sure what that might have been,” Buffy said truthfully. “Yellow eyes says vampire to me, but the rest of it… don’t know. Plus, with this thing,” Buffy flicked the bobble at the end of her nightcap, “chances are that I won’t see someone who can tell me. It’s supposed to disentangle me so that demons, serial killers, and demonic serial killers don’t pop over for a visit.”

“Oh,” David said, crestfallen.

Buffy turned back to her food, but when she looked up again, David was still there. He had the expression of someone who had a question that they didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to know the answer to, but nevertheless felt like he needed to know. Buffy rolled her eyes, which hurt more than it really should have. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

“Do you believe them?” David blurted out. “Do you believe the things they say?”

“Who?”

David waved his hands inarticulately. “The people here. At Summerland. They… said things. I wanted to know if they were true. If you think they are.”

“Well, you know, if you don’t tell me what they said, I can’t really say if they’re telling the truth.”

“They said… Melanie said that I’m not… that there’s nothing wrong with me. That I’m not… sick. That it’s just my powers, and that with training and time and work I would be – you know?”

Buffy shrugged. “Ptonomy said something like that, when we first met.” Buffy caught David’s confused expression. “You know how we came to pick you up and bring you here? Ptonomy was one of the people who did that for me. He said I was probably psychic, and psychics sometimes have, well, the same sort of problems that we have.”

“Did you believe him?” David said.

Buffy put down her cutlery, pushed away her tray and rubbed her eyes. “I’ve got the ugliest thing that has ever been confused for clothing on my head. If I didn’t believe them, trust me, this thing would be on a bonfire right now. Possibly after some sort of ritual to make sure it doesn’t come back and haunt someone with poor fashion sense.”

“But that isn’t the same thing, is it? That’s just-“

“Look, David,” Buffy interrupted. “I’m too tired for this. I thought I wasn’t too tired for food, but boy, the universe sure disagrees. I’m too tired for this conversation, these doubts. What am I supposed to do? They’re telling us the same things. I’m in the same boat as you, and I guess we’ve just got to hope that the boat doesn’t, like, suddenly explode or something. That’s all I’ve got. You want more, talk to Syd. She was at Clockworks too, same as us.”

David stood and left without a word. Buffy sighed, and wondered if she could have handled it better, and ignored the dark whisper at the back of her head that told her that she could have torn him apart with just a few more words.


	15. Chapter Fifteen

It should have been dark.

When Buffy woke up, it was still night time. She hadn’t bothered to pull her curtains shut before she’d crashed out on her bed (in fact, she’d barely bothered to take off her shoes), and there was no light outside. There was grass, and trees waving in the wind, and there were whispering leaves, but there wasn’t anything that even remotely resembled a sunrise.

There was nothing like a sunrise. There was no light, and Buffy wasn’t a Slayer. She had no supernatural gift for seeing in the dark. So there was no reason why she would be able to see the grass, the trees, the leaves. But she could.

It should have been dark. It _was_ dark. It just didn’t seem to matter.

It was cold, too. Buffy had been so tired that she’d fallen asleep on top of her blankets, but she didn’t think she'd be any warmer if she were under them. When she woke up, her jaw was clenched so tightly against the icy air that her teeth hurt, and when she reached up to massage the side of her face to loosen her muscles, she couldn’t even feel her fingers against her skin.

It was cold enough that there was frost snaking across the floor, the walls, the ceiling. For a moment, Buffy thought that it was spelling something out for her, that it was some kind of harsh, angular script. But the moment passed, and she realised that it was just frost.

Not that it being just frost was any comfort, of course. If she was so cold that she couldn’t even feel her feet, then things were bad. She needed to get warm.

Last time, the cold had been confined to just one room. She needed to get out. Judging by the way the frost was busily enveloping the door, she needed to get out _quickly_, otherwise it might stick in place. She didn’t feel up to breaking down a door.

Buffy swung herself upright, which was more difficult than it should have been, given that various bits of her body seemed to still be asleep.

She stumbled towards the door on numb feet.

The door swung open before she could reach it. 

Buffy stood staring it for a long moment. No one had opened it. There was no one there _to_ open it. The corridor outside was just as dark as the world outside her window.

Buffy shot a suspicious look at the frost, but the frost, being frost, didn’t respond. It just began steadily winding its way out of her room.

Buffy shivered, and followed it.

Stepping outside of her room was… odd.

It wasn’t that the corridor was infinitely warmer than her room had been, although that was definitely part of it. When she moved through her doorway, though, she didn’t feel _warmer_. She felt _warm_. She’d been cold, and now she wasn’t. That was fine, that was normal – it’s just that normally when that sort of thing happened, there was an intermediate stage while she warmed up. It wasn’t just some binary thing, either cold or not cold. There was a progression from one to the other.

But not this time. 

Buffy reached up to touch her nightcap, partly to check that it was still there, partly out of a vain hope that it wasn’t. Sadly, the neon green eye-assaulter was still there.

Cary had said that she, as a psychic, could reach the Astral Plane, and as a result had gotten tangled with a different version of herself. The nightcap was supposed to focus her on her own reality, and stop her picking up static from the Astral Plane.

The Astral Plane, of course, being somewhere that wasn’t quite a dream and wasn’t quite reality. In short, the Astral Plane was the sort of place where it being dark didn’t mean that you couldn’t see, or where warming yourself up was as easy as moving from one room to another.

“Well,” Buffy said to no one in particular, “it looks like we aren’t in Kansas anymore.”

Out of curiosity, she turned to look behind her, wondering if she’d see her sleeping body sprawled out on her bed. 

She didn’t. She couldn’t see into her room at all – there was a sheet of ice in the way. It was thick, blue-white, and seemed to have sprung up in about a minute or so. Though it was opaque, there was nevertheless the sense that there was something behind it, something moving in the dark and the cold. Buffy shivered, and looked away.

Frost was busily winding its way to her right, meandering across the walls, ceiling and floor. Buffy decided that she didn’t want to go that way – she’d had enough of the cold – and started moving in the other direction. She didn’t have anything better to do. As far as she could tell, she was on another plane of existence. She didn’t know how she’d gotten there, and she didn’t know how she could get out. The best she could do was keep moving, and hope that something turned up.

Besides, Cary’s lab was that way, and although she heavily doubted that she’d find him if she went to his lab – there was no reason for him to be on the Astral Plane, after all – it was one of about three places in Clockworks that she actually knew the location of. And again, she didn’t have anywhere better to go.

So she walked.

She moved, her socked feet padding across the carpeted floor, slow and deliberate. There was no light, but that didn’t seem to matter. There was just her. No stray people from another dimension, not even the remnants of Caleb in her head. There was just her, alone in the dark, moving along the corridor.

The corridor seemed much longer than it normally did. She thought that she should have reached the staircase that led up to Cary’s lab by now. In fact, she was _certain_ of it. She stopped walking, thinking that she wasn’t getting anywhere, and just for a moment she felt sure that the sound of her footsteps continued, as though there was someone else still walking.

Buffy whirled around to look behind herself, suddenly absolutely _sure_ that there was someone, some_thing_ creeping up behind her, shuffling along in time with her footsteps. But there wasn’t. There was just the doorway to her room, blocked by ice, and the corridor, bristling with frost, interminably leading off into the distance. Her doorway was just a few feet behind her, as though she had only been walking for a couple of seconds.

Buffy frowned. “Don’t like that,” she said, more for the comfort of hearing her own voice than for any other reason.

Except that was how things worked in dreams, she reflected. It wasn’t unusual to dream that you were moving, but not getting anywhere. She’d always hated those dreams. At least you knew where you were with dreams of creepy things popping up behind you. Of course, it probably wasn’t a place that you _liked_, but it was better than frustration and the panicked feeling that you might end up nowhere at all.

So. Just walking didn’t seem like it was going to get her anywhere. She didn’t want to follow the frost, and she couldn’t get back into her room. So what other options did she have?

The answer was a few feet away. Her room wasn’t the _only_ room on this corridor. There were others. She wasn’t sure what they were, but even if they were bedrooms like her own, even if they had people sleeping in them… it had to be better than just standing in a dark hallway. Besides, this was a building full of mutants and people who worked with mutants. While they wouldn’t like having a girl in a hideous nightcap break into their room in the middle of the night, they’d probably understand.

That is, of course, if anyone else was even there.

Buffy shuffled over to the nearby door, and was mildly surprised that she actually moved towards it. She’d half expected it to retreat from her.

The door, if it was a bedroom door, should have been locked. But then, hers should have been locked too, and that had opened without her even touching it. This door, apparently, was closer to the reality side of things than the dream, and waited for her to turn the handle before it opened.

It was a bedroom. Buffy could tell because there was a bed in it. The bed was occupied.

By a snowman.

It was lying on its back, the blankets pulled tightly over the round ball of snow that formed its body. One of the branches that were its arms poked out of the side. It stared straight upwards, two shiny eyes of coal pressed firmly into the grey ice, just above a mildly off-centre carrot nose. There was even a pipe that had been placed in it at a jaunty angle.

Buffy rubbed her eyes. This was getting weird, even for a plane that was only half real at best.

She immediately regretted closing her eyes because there was a thud in front of her, as though something had hit the floor. Her first thought was that it was a giant footstep, but when her eyes flashed open there was nothing out of place. There was still the snowman, tucked safely in bed. It hadn’t leapt out. The thud hadn’t been the sound of impacted ice landing on the carpet. Nothing was out of place. The snowman was still staring at the ceiling, the nose was still off-centre, there was still a lopsided smile picked out by lumps of coal –

The pipe that had been there before was now lying on the floor.

Buffy slammed the door shut. Over the sound of it rattling in its frame, she heard a cold chuckle.

She ran. She didn’t think about it. She just did it. She didn’t consider the possibility that she might end up running in place. All she knew was that she wasn’t a Slayer. She didn’t fight, didn’t know how to fight. She didn’t know how to deal with chuckling snowmen, so she wasn’t going to deal with it. She just needed to get away.

When she finally stopped running, doubled over breathless, heart pounding hard enough that she felt like her ribs might break, blood thrumming in her ears, she was at the staircase that led up to Cary’s lab.

When Buffy calmed down, she realised that the staircase now went _down_ was well. It hadn’t before. She’d climbed it a couple of times now, and not even when she’d been walking with a crazy vampire had there been more than one flight of stairs.

But there was now.

As far as she could tell, they were identical to the stairs she was familiar with. They weren’t made of ice, or anything weird. They looked, all things considered, like perfectly ordinary steps. They just weren’t normally there.

Buffy wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t going to climb down a staircase that hadn’t been there a few hours ago – as far as she knew, there was no reason that it wouldn’t stop being there while she was halfway down. She’d been buried before. She wasn’t going to do that again. Besides, there was just no _reason_ for her to use them. Admittedly, the reason that she wanted to go _up_ the stairs wasn’t a very _good_ reason, but in a place like this, any kind of reason at all had to be a good thing.

So, after she paused for a few moments to get her breath back, she started to climb.

As it turned out, that was a bad idea. When she was almost at the top, the stairs suddenly flattened, becoming some kind of slide. Buffy lunged forward, trying to reach the landing, but she wasn’t tall enough, her arms were too short. She was falling.

Buffy barely had time to take that in before she was hurtling back down, ready to crash into the floor. She had just enough presence of mind to squeeze her eyes shut and brace for impact.

The impact never happened. After a moment, two moments, three, after Buffy was _sure_ that she should have crashed into the ground, she decided to crack open one eye. A second later, she opened the other.

She wasn’t in any immediate danger of crashing into something. There wasn’t anything that she could even crash _into_. She wasn’t skidding down a slide anymore. She wasn’t even in Summerland at all, at least as far as she could tell. She was in some kind of tube.

She reached out, trying to wedge herself so that she could bring herself to a halt, but it didn’t work. Oh, she could reach the walls of the tube, she could even push herself against them, but it just didn’t seem to generate any actual friction. The walls felt weird against her skin, too. They felt smooth, incredibly, _impossibly_ smooth, and slightly cold to the touch. They felt almost like ice, but there was no moisture, they weren’t _quite_ cold enough to be ice, and they were the wrong colour.

They weren’t really a colour at all, in fact. They weren’t transparent, but Buffy got the impression that they really should have been, because even though they were opaque it was impossible to describe what colour they were. Not black, not blue, not white, not anything at all.

It made Buffy feel uncomfortable, and more than a little bit nauseous. She felt like the colourless tube had bypassed her eyes and was busy attacking her gut, tearing at her stomach and filling her insides with acid.

After a few moments of that, it occurred to her that she could just close her eyes. If she couldn’t see the tube, it couldn’t hurt her, its weird lack of colour wouldn’t be an assault on everything natural. So she closed her eyes, and tried to ignore the fact that she was hurtling down a tube in a realm that wasn’t entirely real. 

As a result, she didn’t see the moment that the tube ended, didn’t realise that it was about to end until it already had. She was propelled outwards, flying into empty space. Her eyes slammed open, and vertigo grabbed her heart in a claw of iron.

Out below her, so _far_ below her that she almost couldn’t see it at all, was the ground. It was, admittedly, an odd looking, unnatural green, and it didn’t seem to have any features that she could see, but that didn’t change the fact that it was _far_ below her.

Buffy wasn’t good with heights. Hadn’t been, ever since she’d spent some time on top of a rickety iron tower in a town that didn’t exist.

Fortunately, though, there was something else, something nearby. It looked like a small iceberg, irregular, jagged, and floating in the air without any apparent means of support, but she was heading right for it. If she could catch hold of it, if she could hold on, then she wouldn’t have to fall to her uncertain death.

She slammed into it, the force of the impact driving the air out of her lungs. Her hands scrabbled frantically as she slipped down, and she could feel the ice tear at her skin, blood trickling down her fingers and making the task of holding on just that much harder. But eventually she managed to get a hold, and she hung there, breathing fast and hard as she tried not to look down.

After a moment, she looked up, and saw two things.

The first was the tube that she had come through, which burst like a bubble. It dissolved into millions of tiny rainbow droplets – the fact that none of the colours of that rainbow were colours that Buffy recognised was beside the point. 

The second was the thing that she’d managed to hold onto. It wasn’t, as she’d first thought, some kind of outcropping on the irregular surface of the iceberg. It was a metal wheel lock, like the sort of thing that you often see on bank vaults. The difference was that, while those were circular, with spokes radiating out from the centre, this one was an oval.

In short, it looked like an eye, surrounded by metal eyelashes. Which Buffy was currently holding onto.


	16. Chapter Sixteen

The thing about dreams, Buffy reflected as she tried to ignore the fact that only her fingertips were stopping her from plummeting to an uncertain death, was that you generally don’t know that you’re in one. Sure, _sometimes_ you do, but after you realise that you usually wake up. Either that, or nothing much happens at all.

Of course, she knew that she wasn’t, technically, dreaming. But the Astral Plane was _half_ dream, and that was enough to get you things like this. 

She was hanging from an eye-shaped door in the side of a floating iceberg. Her feet swung gently in the breeze. But, even though her hands were slippery with blood, after scrabbling frantically at the ice to find some kind of purchase, Buffy didn’t feel like she was in any immediate danger of falling.

It wasn’t that she was supremely fit, or anything like that. A Slayer probably could have hung here for _days_, but she wasn’t a Slayer. Sure, Clockworks had made sure that she was reasonably fit, hoping that an exercise regimen would help her mental state, but that absolutely wasn’t enough to handle anything like this. She should have dropped ages ago.

But her arms didn’t feel tired. They should. They should be shaking, _screaming_ at her to let go, to fall. But they weren’t. As far as her body was concerned, she could have stayed there for an eternity.

Buffy had had dreams like this before. Oh, not about hanging from a door in the side of a floating iceberg, no one had dreams about that. She’d had dreams about holding on by her fingertips. It hadn’t taken the psychiatrists at Clockworks to work that one out.

And in those dreams, Buffy normally fell. She fell, and she hit the ground, and then…

Well, Buffy didn’t want to think about that. The important thing was, _this_ time, she _wouldn’t_ fall.

So. She had two choices. Either she could keep hanging and hope that she’d suddenly stop being in the Astral Plane. It was possible, she supposed – the nightcap was supposed to stop her from being connected to her alternate self from across the Plane. Maybe once the 48 hours were up she’d snap back to being in her bed, or something.

But then again, maybe not. In any case, there were few things that Buffy could imagine that would be as hellish as that.

The other option would be to open the door, which was harder than it sounded. For one thing, she’d need to move, which would mean that she might lose the precarious, slippery hold that she had. For another, she’d need to get the leverage to actually turn it, which meant she’d need to find some kind of foothold. There _were_ places that she could put her feet – but the iceberg was also pretty close to vertical, so she’d have to hold onto the door to stop herself from falling and turn it at the same time. She wasn’t sure she could do it, dream physics or not.

But then, she didn’t really have a choice. Because hanging there for an eternity just _wasn’t_ and option.

Okay then. One foot _here_, one foot _there_ \- oh, no, too slippery, can’t do that, how about _there_, nope, not a contortionist – aha, _there_ worked! Okay then, brace and _turn_, carefully compensate for the blood on her hands…

The wheel gradually began to turn, smoothly, silently, as though it had been recently oiled. But Buffy hadn’t thought about the fact that the door opening would cause her even more trouble, because then the door would be between her and whatever was behind it. So when the door swung open, she swung with it, once again dangling over the empty air. 

Okay then. If she hoisted herself up, she could put her foot in the centre of the eye, pull herself up and over the door and swing herself into the little dark tunnel in the side of the iceberg. 

She almost fell out again as soon as she did. The moment that she was inside there was a sudden noise, like some kind of alarm. It took Buffy a moment to realise that it was a trumpet playing, harsh and discordant, like the sort of thing that plays in horror soundtracks right before the killer pops up with a knife. All in all, it was precisely not the kind of thing that Buffy wanted to hear when she was crawling through a dark tunnel in an iceberg.

She paused to take her bearings. The tunnel sloped gently downwards, and the trumpet was obviously down there somewhere. She could tell by the way that it echoed off the ice. 

As she hesitated, there was a voice. Male, American, possibly with a hint of some other accent, possibly not. Whatever it was, it sounded vaguely annoyed, and it was at the other end of the tunnel. “Are you coming in or not?” 

To her surprise, Buffy shrugged. “Sure. I guess so.” It wasn’t like she had anything better to do. She started to crawl forward before she realised that she could just tuck in her arms and legs and the slippery ice would allow her to slide like a seal.

Buffy wasn’t unduly surprised when she found that the end of the tunnel wasn’t some kind of igloo. It was a square room and, although the walls were slightly translucent and textured to give the impression of ice, they definitely weren’t. The floor was formed of a series of glowing white plastic squares, like an old fashioned disco. There was a record player, a chest of draws, a diving suit on a coat rack, chairs, a table, and a man in a white suit. He had black hair, a salt and pepper beard, and he was looking down at Buffy with a mildly confused expression.

Buffy had seen him once before. The first time that she’d met Melanie, he’d been there too – he’d been wearing the same suit, and he’d wandered around the room humming to himself under his breath. Buffy had known that he hadn’t really been there because people generally react to someone who does that, and she’d thought that he was probably one of Joyce’s friends that she was hallucinating.

It looked like she’d thought wrong.

“Are you okay down there?” He asked mildly. 

Buffy pushed herself to her feet and didn’t bother dignifying that with an answer. “Who’re you? Where – what is this place?”

The man frowned, squinting at her lips. Buffy wondered if she had something there, or if she had something caught in her teeth. When she automatically reached up to sort it out, she only managed to smear herself with blood. “Could you say that again?” The man asked.

Buffy raised her voice, trying to speak louder than the blaring trumpet – which, she now realised, was coming from the record player. “Who are you?”

The man made a twisting motion in the air with his thumb and forefinger. “Again?”

“Who. Are. You?” Buffy began to wonder if this guy was really a person at all. He might be some kind of weird dream entity or something, like the snowman.

“Ah, there we go,” the man said seemingly satisfied. “My name is Oliver Anthony Bird.”

Buffy frowned. Something about that name was familiar. “Say that again.”

“That again,” Oliver said earnestly.

Buffy rolled her eyes and resolved to get a better class of cryptic dream people as soon as she could. “No, not that. Your name. And I swear, if you say ‘your name’ I will _not_ be held responsible for the consequences...”

“Oliver Anthony Bird.”

Buffy paused, then shook her head. “Nope. Nothing.”

“And you are?” Oliver prompted. As he did so, he took a step back and moved to turn off the record player. In a flash of insight, Buffy realised that he was wary of her answer.

“Buffy. Uh, Buffy Summers.”

“Good to know, good to know,” Oliver murmured. “And why are you so loud?”

“So… loud? You’re the one who was playing some kind of screechy trumpet-y thing at, like, noise pollution levels. I only just got here.” 

Oliver turned around and looked at her. It was strange. He looked at her, gaze sweeping over her from head to toe, but it wasn’t like he was really looking _at_ her. The last person who had looked at Buffy like that had been Quentin Travers, who had looked at her as though she was a slab of meat that he was sizing up. This wasn’t quite like that – it wasn’t mind-bogglingly condescending – but it was definitely the look of someone who was trying to figure out what she was.

“What?” Buffy said, after a few seconds of this. “_Do_ I have something in my teeth?”

“Hmm? Oh, no.” Oliver shook his head, as though to clear it. “Drink?”

“Uh, _no_.” Buffy knew better than to take a drink from someone who might actually be a dream. “What did you mean, why am I so loud?”

“Have you ever stood on the edge of an abyss which is so deep that you can’t see the bottom, and so wide that you can’t see the other side?”

“Gotta say no to that one.” Although hanging from the floating iceberg had come close.

“Would you like to?”

“Still no.” Buffy realised that this line of questioning wasn’t likely to get her anywhere, and decided to drop it. She had enough experience dealing with recalcitrant hallucinations to know when to quit. 

He might not be a hallucination, of course. He definitely seemed like one of Joyce’s kookier friends, but that didn’t mean anything. He might be a hallucination, or he might suddenly turn into some kind of chuckling snowman. She just didn’t know. “So. Anyway. Um. Sorry if this is a weird question or anything but, uh, what exactly are you?”

Oliver broke into a smile. “Ah! Good question! I guess you could say that I’m a traveller. Been here for… a long time now.” His smile turned sad. “I can’t seem to remember how to get back.”

“Back where?” Buffy asked, _really_ hoping that the answer didn’t involve hell dimensions or anything wiggy like that.

“Home. You know. You just came from there. What’s the word?” Oliver frowned. “Oh yes. _Dirt_.”

Buffy thought for a moment. “Do you mean Earth?”

“Probably, probably. Things tend to… drift, here.”

Something clicked in her head, and she remembered something that Cary had said. He’d said that you could reach the Astral Plane if you’re a powerful psychic, and Buffy had just accepted that. It had made sense. Willow had managed it, and you don’t get much more powerful than her. But the thing was, Cary _didn’t_ know about Willow. Which meant that he had to know a powerful psychic who had managed it. But, if there’d been a powerful psychic at Summerland, then Buffy was certain that she’d have met them - no need for a disgustingly green nightcap if there’s a psychic around.

There had been a psychic at Summerland. And now he was here. Cary _had_ mentioned something about a bird, when she’d first arrived, but she’d been too exhausted to listen. This had to be the Bird that he’d been talking about.

“You’re from Summerland.”

“Could be,” Oliver said in the tone of someone who didn’t really believe that that was true. “But we’re not here to talk about me. We’re here for you.”

“Yeah, well, if a psychic ended up here and got stuck and I’m, like, _literally_ in the same place as them, _I’d_ like to know what they did so that I don’t do it. As, uh, _cool_ as Iceberg Land is, a nice place to stay it is not.”

Oliver leant forward. “What makes you think that you can do the same things I did?”

“Uh, hello?” Buffy gestured towards herself. “I’m here.”

“Reaching the same destination doesn’t mean that you had the same journey.”

“Right. If you could not with the things that sound like they mean something but actually don’t, that would be great.”

“Buffy,” Oliver said gently, “what makes you think that you’re psychic?”


	17. Chapter Seventeen

“Why would you say that?” Buffy snapped. “Of course I’m psychic. What else would I – I’m psychic. Why would you ask if I’m psychic?”

Oliver’s fingers traced patterns in the air as he followed what she was saying. “I didn’t ask if you were psychic. I asked why you think you’re psychic.”

“Uh huh, yeah, and that’s, like, the same thing as saying why do you think there’s a demon sitting in the corner of the room.” Buffy smiled bitterly when Oliver looked in around the room with a confused expression on his face. “It’s the same thing as saying I’m not psychic. So why don’t you just come out and say it?”

“No, no. I didn’t ask whether you were psychic. I didn’t say anything at all about demons – but if there is a demon in the room, here, in this place, then you brought it in with you. I just asked why you think you’re psychic. That’s all.” Oliver’s expression became serious. “The stories we tell ourselves are important. Both here and in the real world. The things we say, the language we use – the meaning of things is important. If you remember nothing else, remember that. All I asked is why you think you’re psychic.”

“Okay,” Buffy said, slowly. “Cary told me that he knew what was wrong with me. That I wasn’t sick. That I was psychic, and there was another version of me, somewhere, out across the Astral Plane, and because I was psychic I was entangled with her. With her world.”

“And you believed him.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Buffy retorted. “He had, uh, something, some kind of device, and he hooked it up to my brain. He’s the guy who knows things, and when he says that he knows what’s wrong, why wouldn’t I believe him? Who else should I believe?”

Oliver leant forward, and for a moment, Buffy thought that he was going to say that she should believe him, that he knew what he was doing, that he could train her, that he could make her better. That he could make her well. But he didn’t. “Buffy,” Oliver said softly, “if the world’s on fire, and you can only save one thing, what do you save?”

Buffy blinked in surprise. “What kind of question is that?”

“An important one, I think.”

Buffy crossed her arms. “You know what? I’ve had enough of this. You keep saying these cryptic things and you are like _totally_ not all there in the head department. I came in here because it was better than what was out there, but if you don’t know how to leave then you aren’t any help to me. So you can stay here with your ice and your screechy trumpets and your diving suit, because I’m out.”

It was a good speech. The tone was perfect, just the right mixture of acid and scorn. It was such a shame that it was spoiled by her having to look around and try and see where the exit actually was. As far as she could see, there was no way out. Even the tunnel that she’d slid down had vanished. 

Oliver looked at her sadly. “One more question. Just one. You don’t even Have to answer it – just one question, and then I’ll show you the door.”

Buffy would have liked nothing more than to say no, but she had no idea how to leave. There wasn’t anyone there except for her and Oliver, so she couldn’t ask them to use some kind of mojo and then split. She didn’t have a choice. “Fine.”

“Have you seen your eyes?”

Buffy frowned. Eyes again. She opened her mouth to say that her eyes were fine, but she’d said that when Cary had asked about them, and since then there’d been even more eye stuff going on. “No. What’s wrong with my eyes?”

“Would you like to see them?”

“Yeah. Sure. I guess.”

Oliver reached into a pocket, and pulled out a bunch of red-and-white flower petals, which he put into his mouth and began chewing vigorously. Apparently that wasn’t what he was looking for, though, because he went rummaging again; this time, he found a small wooden comb with most of its teeth missing, which he reverentially placed on a nearby table. Then he pulled out something that looked like a fresh human tongue, which he looked at for a long moment before shrugging and tossing it over his shoulder. Then, finally, he pulled out a long tuning fork which definitely shouldn’t have fitted into his pocket, which he tapped against the wall.

There was a high, clear ringing sound, like the sound you hear when you flick an empty wine glass, and a sheet of ice fell off the wall. In its place was a full length mirror, complete with a plain wooden frame. Oliver gestured at it, still chewing.

Buffy paused, suddenly unsure as to whether she actually did want to do this after all. Then she took a breath, and stepped forward. 

The first thing she noticed was that the nightcap was somehow even more hideous on her head than she could have possibly imagined. The sheer fashion nightmare that was that thing wasn’t helped any by the fact that there was bloodstains on her clothes, or that at some point she’d managed to tear the knee of her trousers so that there was now a piece of dangling fabric. She hadn’t even realised that she’d managed that. There was fresh blood smeared around her mouth, too, which made her look like a vampire.

It was only after she took in the disaster that was her that she managed to bring herself to look at her eyes.

They looked like normal eyes, more or less. There was everything that you’d expect an eye to have – pupil, iris, and white. Despite the rest of her appearance, her eyes weren’t vampire yellow. Nor were they pitch black, darker than night. They looked like her eyes. She’d seen them in the mirror pretty much every day. 

They looked _like_ her eyes normally did, but that didn’t mean that they were. They looked like she had a thin, dark film across them. The whites of her eyes, which should have actually been white, weren’t. They were a sort of pale grey. Her irises weren’t hazel because they were a few shades darker than they should have been, which put them closer to brown. Her pupils, though, were blacker than black, so dark that they seemed almost to be pulling the light into themselves, darkening the rest of her eyes. Buffy was forcibly reminded of the eye in the cloud world, with its jagged, torn pupil that had been like a vacuum, pulling everything into oblivion.

Buffy narrowed her eyes, opened them wide. The eyes in the mirror did the same thing. Despite the evidence, she couldn’t quite accept that they were hers.

She heard footsteps behind her, slow and deliberate, and then saw Oliver come to stand behind her. “What’s wrong with my eyes?” Buffy said. In the cold, her breath billowed outwards and fogged up the mirror. As it faded away, for a moment she felt certain that it would leave a message, telling her to run, but it didn’t. It was just fog on a mirror, nothing more.

Oliver held up a hand, indicating for her to wait. He reached into his mouth with one hand and rooted around, as though there was something caught between his teeth. After a moment, he pulled an entire flower from his mouth, roots first. He put it into a nearby glass of water.

Buffy immediately regretted asking him anything serious.

Oliver ran his tongue over his teeth, and then shrugged. “I have a – what’s the word? Apathy? Aptitude? – for psychic matters. There’s a… I suppose you would call it a sound, which psychic minds make. Like mist over grass in the morning. You don’t sound like that. I’ve never heard anything that sounds like you. I don’t know what’s going on with your eyes.”

“I just _know_ that I am so not gonna want to hear the answer, but what do I sound like?”

“I told you,” Oliver said, looking surprised.

Buffy tilted her head. “Uh, no. Definitely a big nope on that one. Unless you’re saying I sound like a screechy trumpet, in which case you can-“

“Didn’t I mention the infinitely wide and infinitely deep abyss?” Oliver frowned. “I’m sure I mentioned it.”

“I mean, sure, you mentioned it, but it wasn’t like ‘Hey Buffy, your mind sounds like the Grand Canyon’. It was a bit more, um, whacko than that.”

“To say that your mind sounds like the Grand Canyon would be an understatement. Maybe the depths of space sounds like you, or the bottom of the ocean, but in my experience, nothing psychic sounds like you.”

“Cool. Yeah.” The corners of Buffy’s mouth twisted downwards. “So do you, like, actually have a theory or something or is it just inter-dimensional dump on Buffy day?”

“Not… exactly. All I can suggest is that, when there’s something as empty as your mind-“

“Thanks for that,” Buffy said sarcastically.

“-then there are plenty of things that would rush to fill it.”

“Uh huh.” Buffy looked in the mirror again, at the eyes that were just a few shades darker than they should have been. If there’s a demon in the room, then it’s one that you’ve brought in with you. “Like, maybe some creepy guy with a creepy eye?”

“Maybe,” Oliver said, although he clearly didn’t know what Buffy was talking about.

“Right.” Well, Walter _was_ at Summerland. She might have absolutely no idea what was going on with her head, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t get him _out_ of it. Of course, she had no idea how she could actually do that either, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t. “Well, anyway, you’ve had your one question. I should get back now. So if you could, you know, door me.”

“Oh, yes. Of course.” Oliver grabbed the frame of the mirror and, with a grunt, swung it outwards. There was nothing behind it. Literally nothing. Light didn’t illuminate it. There was nothing there to be illuminated. “Thanks for dropping by. It was nice to see that nightcap again. I don’t think I ever saw Cary wear it.”

Of course the cap was Oliver’s. “So, uh, what happens when I go through there?”

“You go home,” Oliver said. “Probably.”

“Uh huh. Reassuring that is not. But if you can open doors back to Earth, why don’t you just… go back?”

“When is a door not a door?” 

Buffy rolled her eyes. “I don’t know, when is a door not a door?”

“When it’s a jar.” Oliver chuckled, as though what he’d just said was actually funny.

Buffy nodded. “Well, that covers that.” With a deep breath, she plunged forward, into the nothingness…

… and catapulted herself upright, looking around wildly. She was in her room. There was no frost. Everything was just the way that she’d left it. She even had the grimy feeling she always had when she slept in her clothes. Her clothes themselves were neither bloody nor torn, and her hands were uninjured. It was early in the morning, and the sun was streaming through the window. She’d slept through the night.

Okay. First things first, she needed to speak to Cary. Not least because she really wanted a shower, but wasn’t quite sure how to manage that with a nightcap full of tech on her head. Especially given that the nightcap probably wasn’t doing anything for her, if Oliver was right. She’d love to take it off, but she wasn’t sure what that would do.

Still, she got changed and everything before she left her room. When she reached out to her door to open it, she half-expected it to swing open all by itself, but it didn’t. It didn’t take an absurdly long time to get to Cary’s lab, either. 

It wasn’t until she was actually outside Cary’s lab that she realised that he might not be there. He wasn’t Giles, who tended to be in the library all hours of the day researching things. Just because Cary had been here every time she’d gone looking for him didn’t mean that he’d be there this time. It _was_ early in the morning, after all.

As it turned out, he wasn’t there. Kerry was, though. She was sitting on the edge of a table and fiddling with something that Buffy was sure Cary would rather she not fiddle with while she listened to someone talk to her.

It took Buffy a moment to realise that the person talking to her was Ptonomy. Last time she’d seen him, he’d been very ill and looked like it. Now, he looked healthy. He was wearing the same suit that he always seemed to wear, and his flat cap was resting on his lap.

“Hi,” Buffy said in surprise. “You look much better.”

“Thank you,” Ptonomy replied. “Was it your work?”

“Are we back on that again? Was what my work?”

“I was lying on my bed, in the night. I was… asleep. And then I woke up and there was this… frost on me. It was like it was pulling the fever out of me. Then, between one moment and the next, it was gone, and here I am. Right as rain.”

Buffy just stared at him.


	18. Chapter Eighteen

There were a lot of questions that Buffy would like answered. Things like what her power actually was, if Walter was in her head and how she could get him out, and why Oliver had had a human tongue in his pocket. Okay, so that last one might not be _that_ important, but if she was going to take advice from someone she’d like to know why they carried body parts around.

There were a lot of questions that Buffy would like answered, but absolutely none of them were about what Cary wore when he was sleeping. At least, none of them were until he actually turned up, because then she had quite a few.

He was wearing an old-fashioned, shapeless robe-like thing which reached down to his ankles, for which Buffy was profoundly grateful, and a loosely tied dressing gown, which she wasn’t quite as grateful for. The colours were the main issue. The dressing gown was a deep, vibrant purple which seemed like the sort of colour that someone would have be heavily stoned a lot of the time to find tolerable - which was odd, because as far as Buffy could tell it looked pretty much brand new, and her brain just couldn’t contemplate a stoned Cary. It just didn’t compute. The robe, on the other hand, was a pale lilac. Buffy suspected that it had probably been white once, but then it had been put through the wash with something pink or purple. Perhaps even with the dressing gown. Though the two things didn’t _quite_ clash, the combination still made Buffy’s eyes water. 

Ptonomy apparently caught her expression. “Don’t ask.”

“But-”

“You _really_ don’t want to know.” Buffy shot him a glance, and couldn’t tell whether he was being serious or not. Given her recent experiences, she decided she didn’t want to risk it.

“Okay,” Cary said, stifling a yawn. “Kerry said you went to the Astral Plane?”

Buffy nodded. She’d begun to tell Kerry and Ptonomy what had happened during the night, until Kerry had interrupted her and told her that she was going to get Cary. “I think so. I mean, I’m not sure, I’ve never really been there before, but it seemed like a sort of mostly dream-y place.”

“She met Oliver,” Ptonomy said.

“Really?” Cary adjusted his glasses and peered at her. Buffy got the impression that it was the same sort of thing that Giles did at times like this. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he might as well toy with his glasses. “How was he?”

Buffy waved a hand. “He was a little, uh, you know. Screwy. A few cherries short of a pie. He had a tongue in one of his pockets, and he pulled a whole flower, roots and all, out of his mouth.”

Cary opened his mouth to say something, but Kerry spoke first. “Did he read you any poetry?”

“Uh, no,” Buffy said slowly. “Should he have?”

Kerry nodded fervently. “Oh, yes. He used to lurk around corners and spring slam poetry on people.”

Buffy tried to digest it, found that she couldn’t, and decided to change the subject. “He suggested that I might not be psychic.”

Cary frowned. “Hmm. What did he say, exactly?”

“He said something about my mind not sounding like psychic minds. Apparently psychics sound like, I don’t know, windy grass or something. I sound like an infinitely wide and infinitely deep abyss, and no, personal comments will not be appreciated.”

“Interesting.” Cary twined the cord of his dressing gown around his fingers. “Oliver once described what being a telepath was like. Everyone always thinks that it’s as easy as pointing your mind at someone and then you know what they’re thinking, and if you probe a little deeper then you know what they’ve thought. But it isn’t. You hear everyone, all the time. Your mind has difficulty staying in your head, so it reaches out and finds these dazzling, sparking things that don’t know what they’re thinking themselves half the time. The trick is to become like a mist, to drift through the things that aren’t what you’re looking for and cling to what you are.”

Kerry snorted. “He actually sang a little song about it. Cary’s summarising.”

“Yes, well, the principle is the same. The mind of any accomplished telepath, one who isn’t overwhelmed by all the voices and thoughts that aren’t theirs, has to be like mist.”

Buffy was about to say that that didn’t make anything that even looked like sense - minds not staying in heads and having to be mist sounded like complete gibberish - but then she remembered what it had been like when she’d got demon blood on her and she’d become a telepath. It _had_ started out with her just pointing her mind at people, but it hadn't stopped there - she’d started hearing people that she wasn’t focusing on, and then she’d started hearing _everything_. She’d almost died - she couldn’t imagine what it would be like if someone naturally had power like that, all the time.

Well. That wasn’t true. They’d end up like David. Knowing things before they were told, hearing things that weren’t anything more than echoes dredged up from the subconscious. Or someone who wore old fashioned suits and sprang slam poetry on people. No one could have power like that and not crack.

“Okay. So psychics have misty minds, or whatever. I don’t. Where does that actually leave us?”

“It leaves us with two options. Either you aren’t psychic, or at least not conventionally so, and you’re tangled up on the Astral Plane for some other reason. Or you _are_ psychic, but you don’t sound like you are because you don’t know what you’re doing. You aren’t reaching out to touch other minds - they’re falling into you,” Cary said, ticking off points on his fingers. 

“So which is it?”

Cary shrugged apologetically.

“Normally, that would be something that Melanie and I would work on,” Ptonomy interjected. “I would take you back through your memories, look at moments when your power triggered, what triggered it - that sort of thing. Melanie would help you get your head in the game so that you can control what you’re doing.” 

“Which we didn’t have time for, because of David,” Buffy said.

Ptonomy nodded. “You needed to go pick him up before he hurt someone, or Division Three found him. You didn’t have the time to figure out what _you_ could do.”

Buffy remembered something. “Except they weren’t after him. Division Three, I mean. They were after me.”

Cary and Kerry exchanged looks. Ptonomy frowned. “There was a gigantic, circular storm over the city,” Kerry said, as though she was explaining something to someone stupid. “Division Three would have definitely have been there.”

“Yeah, sure, but that doesn’t mean that they were looking for _David_. Caleb said that they’d found _me_. That I was… leaky, or something.” Buffy didn’t mention that Chrissy had said that Division Three had known that it was her that they were after, or that they’d done their research on her before heading out. She was almost sure that she'd actually been talking to the First, and she had enough experience with that thing to not believe anything that it said. Of course, she had no reason to believe Caleb either, and he and the First went hand in hand, but she didn’t know why Caleb would lie. Caleb was the sort of person who would lie if it would get him something, or if it would hurt someone, but he was too straightforward just to lie for no reason. “Apparently, even though David likes to collapse buildings and catch lightning, he’s quiet enough that Division Three didn’t know about him.”

Ptonomy and Kerry both looked at Cary, who blinked. “I suppose it’s possible. I found David because I already knew who to look for. Division Three probably hasn’t finished excavating Clockworks yet, so they probably didn’t know that David was alive.” He shot a glance at Buffy. “I don’t know how they knew that _you’re_ alive, but I don’t really know what resources they’ve got, either. If Walter was working with them… yes, they could have tracked you. I think.”

“Oliver said that I’m very loud. My mind, I mean,” Buffy said. “If they tracked me there, if they know I’m alive - could they find us here?”

“No.” Cary’s voice was firm, his reply instantaneous. He might have doubted whether Division Three had tracked Buffy rather than David, but he was absolutely sure about that. “This place doesn’t show up on any maps. Satellites can’t see it - no technology can. I’ve put up baffles and screens everywhere so that none of the, uh, _things_ that happen here draw any unwanted attention. They’d have to send out search parties through the forest and find us manually, and they’ve got no reason to do that. You’re safe here.”

“From Division Three,” Buffy said pointedly. Cary looked confused. 

“You’re worried about the things in your head,” Ptonomy said. It wasn’t a question. Buffy wasn't surprised that he, of all people, understood how she felt.

Buffy nodded. _Nothing outside of you is more threatening than the things inside your head._ Chrissy had been right about that, at least. Sure, military people with guns weren't exactly at the _bottom_ of the list of things that Buffy was afraid of, but given that her last encounter with them had involved them being massacred by a bunch of Bringers that she’d somehow brought into existence, they weren’t exactly at the _top_ either. The Bringers themselves were much scarier, especially given that she didn’t really know what she’d done to bring them out.

“We’ll work on that,” Ptonomy promised. “We’ll get your powers, whatever they are, under your control.”

Buffy almost wished that she could be reassured by that. “It’s not just that. I don’t think that I’m, ah, alone in my head. When I was in the Astral Plane, Oliver showed me a mirror, and my eyes were… dark. Not good, you know. Definitely a thing that was bad. And since the attack outside the motel and Walter attacking my mind there’s been, like, a whole bunch of eye stuff. Oliver told me that if there was a demon in the room then I brought it in with me. If I’m… empty, like he said, then a lot of things will want to set up shop and move in. I think Walter already has, and I’d _really_ like to get him out.” Buffy smiled thinly. “It’s already cramped enough in there as it is.” 

“Any ideas?” Ptonomy asked Cary. Kerry, meanwhile, looked spectacularly bored. Before he answered, Cary extended a hand out to her without looking. She took it - or maybe, she grabbed him by the arm, or she reached out and put her hand on his shoulder, or - actually, Buffy wasn’t really sure what happened. It seemed like Kerry moved _somehow_, and some of that movement seemed to be through the place where Cary was standing, which didn’t seem to matter because Kerry suddenly wasn’t there anymore. Cary lowered his hand as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Which it hadn’t, Buffy supposed. That was just what it was like for those two. Kerry had said that Cary did all the boring things, and Buffy had enough experience with Giles spouting stuff at her that she didn’t have the patience for to know that Kerry felt the same. If she’d had a choice, she’d probably have vanished too.

“Maybe,” Cary replied. “I could build something to look for hot spots in Buffy’s brain, regions with higher blood flow and blood oxygen levels, see which neurons are firing. And then, perhaps, some kind of standing wave would -”

Buffy couldn’t vanish, but she could interrupt. “Yeah, yeah, science, got it. Do you need me here?”

Cary looked mildly taken aback. “No, not really. Not at the moment, at least.”

“Cool. Because I want to talk to him.”

“Why?” Ptonomy asked.

“He’s invading my head. I mean, I think he is. Maybe I can get him to stop.” It sounded weak, Buffy knew. But her mind wasn’t exactly a normal mind. She didn’t know exactly what about made it not normal, but it definitely wasn’t. Maybe, if she was face to face, something might happen. Maybe someone would show up, someone who knew more about this sort of thing than she did. Willow, for example, or even Dawn.

“The thing is,” Ptonomy said seriously, “do _you_ want to talk to Walter, or does _Walter_ want to talk to you?”

Buffy tilted her head. “What? You just said the same thing twice.”

“If he’s in your head, he could be influencing you. Maybe he’s got an escape plan, and you’re it,” Ptonomy explained. “We don’t know what your power can do, yet. Could be that if you’re close enough, he’ll take over, make you do something.”

“Then you can come with me. You can do that thing you did with the soldiers, back at Clockworks. Make me sleep, or whatever.”

“I can.” Ptonomy shoved his hands into his pockets. “If you want. If you’re sure. But you need to know, this could be dangerous.”

Buffy took a deep breath, then nodded. “I know. I’m sure.”

Ptonomy looked at her closely for a long moment, then he shrugged. “Let’s go.”


	19. Chapter Nineteen

“So,” Buffy said as they walked, “how are you?”

Ptonomy shot her a look. “That’s a pointed question.”

“You went to bed sick and woke up well because some magic ice pulled the illness out of you. Seems like a fair question, don’t you think?”

Ptonomy shrugged. “You said it. I went to bed sick and woke up well. Never been a fan of being sick, so…”

“Right. Yeah. Makes sense.”

“You say that as though it doesn’t.”

“The thing is, magic doesn’t work like that. I mean, I’m not an expert or anything, but I know what magical healing feels like. If it’s good magic, it’s just warm, you know, like you’re taking a shower or something. The wound itches a bit, but that’s about it. Bad mojo is _much_ faster, but it also feels like you’re being drowned in acid, which is not a thing that’s good. But ice? Ice isn’t really a thing that’s known for healing. Or if it is, I don’t know it. You know?”

Ptonomy mulled that over. “So you’re saying you don’t think that the ice was you?”

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t see how it _could_ be me. I was in my room and everything was icy, really Winter Wonderland, but then when I left the frost went one way and I went the other. I’d say it was probably Oliver, because living in a giant ice cube is his thing, so maybe healing with ice is too. But then there was a creepy giggling snowman, and that, um, didn’t _feel_ like Oliver. It doesn’t seem like something he’d do.”

“So you’re saying that there’s an evil Frosty the Snowman on the Astral Plane, and he healed me?”

“Well when you put it like _that_ I feel like I have to say no, but I’m, like, 90% sure it wasn’t me and if it was Oliver then he’s way, way more whacko than I thought he was. Which is saying a lot, given that he’s majorly whacko.”

Ptonomy smiled at that. “Well, the Astral Plane is a strange place. I guess it’ll just be a mystery for now.”

“Yeah, been getting that a lot lately,” Buffy said sourly. “A mystery here, a riddle there. Not my thing. Clean, simple resolutions are order of the day.”

“Doesn’t seem that likely.”

“It never does.” Buffy sighed. “Anyway. Can I ask you a question?”

“Is there anything in the universe that could stop you?”

“Well, _yes_. Loads.”

“I doubt that,” Ptonomy said with a smile.

“Uh, thanks. I guess. So is that a yes?”

“Sure.”

Buffy paused for a moment, to compose her thoughts. This was important. “How do you do it? You have all these memories – yours, other peoples, all of that. But you’re fine. I mean, sure, you kinda spilled over a bit when you were sick but, hey, nobody’s perfect. You have all these things in your head, but you don’t… but you’re fine.” Buffy took a deep breath. “The first time it happened for me, I was in class. We were talking about… I don’t know, boys, or something. And then, between one moment and the next, I was buried, drowning in the darkness. I felt… broken, and I had been torn out of – anyway, yeah, then suddenly I was back and everyone was still there and talking but I wasn’t _me_. Not anymore. Can you imagine – no. You can. You _know_. You know, but you still walk around and smile and joke and – I need to know how.”

Buffy had avoided looking at Ptonomy while she’d been talking. She’d thought that, if she looked at him, she wouldn’t be able to continue. But once she’d finished, she looked. She wished she hadn’t. His face was blank, cold and still. There was no expression on it, not because he wasn’t feeling anything, but because there was too much for him to possibly express. She knew that look. She’d seen it often enough. 

She reached out to touch him on the arm, and she opened her mouth to apologise, but he sighed. “Ah. One of the big ones.” 

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” Buffy said hurriedly. “I just, um, I just wanted to-“

“It’s fine,” Ptonomy replied. His voice was calm, and flat. There was no emotion in it, none at all. Even so, he moved away from Buffy slightly. She let her arm fall back down to her side. “I don’t think it’ll be a lot of help to you, though.”

Buffy shrugged. “Try me.”

“I’ve had my powers a lot longer than you. Since birth. Before that, even. The thing is, though, most days are the same. Especially when you’re a baby. You wake up, eat, cry, sleep, rinse and repeat. But when you remember everything, and everything is the same, over and over and over again, the problem is that you don’t know when _now_ is. If now is the same as yesterday is the same as the day before, then the present doesn’t really exist. There’s no time, really. I got older, and there started being new things in my day, but all of it was just… variations on a theme. Go to school, get yelled at, cry, rinse and repeat. What is now when all days are the same?”

Buffy nodded absently, and then frowned when she realised that he’d stopped talking, as though he expected her to answer. She didn’t know what to say. She’d never had that problem. Her life was so radically different from Buffy the Slayer that there was no real comparison. Oh, sure, there were some problems that were a bit like that – she wasn’t entirely sure how old she was, for one thing, because she had decades of memories, her own and the Slayer’s. But she always knew what time it was. “I don’t know.”

Ptonomy smiled, or at least moved his lips in such a way as to give the impression of a smile. “Eventually, I leaned into it. I wear the same suits, the same hats. If all days are the same, then everything is fine – I made it through yesterday, and yesterday is the same as today, so I must make it through today. It’s a fallacy, I know, but… there is so much in my head. I can’t imagine what it’s like to forget.” His voice became wistful. “I dream about it, sometimes. To be an amnesiac. To see things as though I’d never seen them before. My mind is full, and I can’t empty it. So I take it one day at a time – and one day is the same as every day.”

“I’m sorry.”

His smile warmed slightly, and he gave a lopsided shrug. “It is what it is.” He might have said something else, or Buffy might have spoken, but instead he just pointed at a door ahead of them. “We’re here.”

“Right.” Buffy squared her shoulders. “You good?”

“Of course,” Ptonomy said, and he opened the door.

Buffy was momentarily surprised that it wasn’t locked, until she followed him through. The room was pretty much the same as her own, albeit larger. There was a bed, a chest of drawers, everything Buffy would expect to see. But there was a line drawn on the floor. It was always about three feet from the wall, and it went all the way around the room. There was a handwritten sign which said ‘Don’t cross the Line’ – given that it was taped to seemingly empty space a few feet above where the line was, Buffy wasn’t inclined to find out what would happen if she did.

There were two people in the room. Walter was there, of course. He was sitting on the floor. He had a knife, and he’d snapped a leg off of the table and was busy whittling something. Buffy wasn’t quite sure what it was – her experience with whittling began and ended with stakes – but as far as she could tell it wasn’t an eye, which was something of a surprise. 

The second person was Angel. He was standing in the corner of the room, arms crossed, glowering at Walter. He didn’t acknowledge her or Ptonomy’s arrival. She wondered how long he’d been there, or what would happen if he crossed the line.

“How come he was a knife?” Buffy asked. She wasn’t sure if the question was addressed to Angel or Ptonomy.

Ptonomy shrugged. “He’s Walter. Of course he has a knife.”

Walter looked up. There was the same expression of mild amusement on his face that there had been when Rudy had floated him in. He continued whittling away at the broken table leg, although he wasn’t looking at what he was doing. Buffy supposed that someone who could take a punch from Caleb wouldn’t be bothered if he accidentally cut himself. 

He wasn’t looking at Ptonomy. He didn’t seem to even be really aware that he was in the room. He didn’t acknowledge that Angel was there, either. He curved his lips into something that could only technically be called a smile. “I was wondering when you’d come to see me.”

“What did you do to my head?”

Walter quirked an eyebrow. “You know what I did. You felt it. You _saw_. You and your preacher.”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure, you attacked me like a wormy… mind worm thing. Got that. But whatever you did, you’re gonna stop.”

“Am I?” Walter’s smile deepened. “Why would I do that?”

“Do you enjoy breathing?” Angel rumbled.

“Oh, no. I’m not talking to you. I’m not interested in echoes.” Walter didn’t even look at Angel, didn’t look away from Buffy. “I want to know what you’re going to do, little girl. Kill me? My powers won’t work if I’m dead. Will you cross the line, you and your grumpy minion in the corner?”

Buffy saw Ptonomy’s gaze flick to the corners of the room. “I don’t need to do that,” Buffy said, hoping that it was true. “You’ve seen my mind. You know the things I’ve got in it-“

“Do you know what Division Three has?” Walter interrupted. “Do you know what _we_ know?”

Buffy frowned. That sounded like he was just restating what she’d just said. “Sure. I spoke to Chrissy.” Or something wearing her face. “You’ve got my files. You know who I am.” Buffy paused for a moment. If she’d been the Slayer, then saying that would have been a threat, and barely even a veiled one. Being Buffy the Vampire Slayer had weight, in that world. But she wasn’t her.

She opened her mouth to speak, but she noticed that, for the first time, Walter seemed wrong-footed. He hadn’t expected her to say that. Why? It had to be her mentioning Chrissy, but what was so interesting about that?

Whatever it was, Walter recovered in an instant, and Buffy wondered if she’d even seen him be unsettled at all. “Did you know that we have… machines that can measure things? Like psychic energy, for one. The incident at Clockworks – do you know the last time we measured that amount of energy?”

Buffy shrugged. “Nope.”

“Never. We’ve never seen anything like that. Not even close.” Walter took a deep breath. Someone like Chrissy would react to news like that with hatred and fear, Buffy thought, but Walter was excited, so excited that he was practically quivering. “We thought it was you. We didn’t know about the boy, and since you killed everyone, there’s no one left to tell them that it wasn’t.”

“What’s your point?”

“There’s a name the bigwigs came up with, for you. World Killer. We weren’t going to kill you. We were to take you in, find out what makes you…tick”. The way that Walter said that made Buffy think of being strapped to an operating table while people with scalpels dissected her. She hadn’t realised that Division Three had Initiative-like practices.

“Still not seeing where the point is. Beyond the creepifying, I mean.”

“If we can’t get you, then we’ll get what you’re closest to. We have your files, but we’ll have a lot more than that, by now. Your mom, for one thing.”


	20. Chapter Twenty

You’re focused on Spike. You have to be focused on Spike, because if you aren’t, then you’ll focus on the fact that he’s currently in your living room, that he’s been talking to your mom. Then, because that just isn’t a thought that fits into your head or the life that you’ve built for yourself over the past couple of years, you’ll end up running along the same tracks that you’ve been running for weeks now – Angel is evil, and he wants to end the world, and you know that you have to kill him, and you know that you can’t.

So, you focus on Spike, and ignore the tiny, tiny hope that maybe he can deal with Angel for you. If he does, then you can hate him, and that would be easy. Easy enough, perhaps, that you could do it and not hate yourself, too.

“Honey, are you sure you’re a Vampire Slayer” Joyce asks. Her voice is timid, _scared_. She isn’t scared of Spike, although she should be – she’s scared of _you_. Or rather, the thing that you are. 

You can’t bring yourself to engage, so you continue talking to Spike. Spike isn’t scared. This is practically a game for him, and everything in you wishes that you could think like that, that all of this could be your average, run-of-the-mill Slaying. 

“I mean, have you tried _not_ being a Vampire Slayer?”

That’s too much for you. You can feel the exasperation radiating from Spike, and you can’t really blame him. Of all the times for your mom to pull her head out of the sand, she had to pick the end of the world. If it wasn’t for the fact that you’re probably a few minutes from crying, you’d laugh. You wouldn’t have a choice – it would be that or snap. In that moment, you wonder, just for the briefest of moments, how you can possibly be related to this person. She doesn’t know you at all.

Then you realise that you’ve tried really, really hard to make sure that she doesn’t. You’ve tried to keep all of this stuff from her, tried to make her think that you’re still her darling little girl, all evidence to the contrary. You hid yourself away from her, and now she’s scared of you. 

Something breaks inside you, just a little bit, and you-

“-know that, right?” Ptonomy asked, his hand on Buffy’s shoulder.

Buffy blinked, and scrubbed her eyes with a sleeve. “What?”

Angel was standing next to her. He hadn’t been, a moment ago – or maybe he had. Buffy wasn’t sure. _She_ hadn’t been here a moment ago. She’d been seventeen and already old.

“He’s just trying to get into your head,” Ptonomy repeated. Walter tilted his head and looked at her curiously.

“Oh. No duh,” Buffy said. Her voice was calm. “Guess Division Three should’ve done their homework better. Mom and I, uh, aren’t exactly on speaking terms.”

She remembered the last time she’d seen Joyce, before Clockworks. They’d been in the kitchen. Joyce had been making coffee – not because either of them had needed it, oh, they had _not_ needed caffeine right then, but because she needed to do something with her hands. That, and if she making coffee, then she didn’t have to look at Buffy. She’d said that one of her friends had asked after Buffy – she’d been sick for a while, by that point – and Joyce had told her that she just wanted a happy, normal daughter, and if she needed to go to a psychiatric hospital to get well, then that’s what she should do.

Joyce had stressed that she hadn’t _meant_ that Buffy wasn’t normal, hadn’t meant to imply that there was something wrong her with her. She’d apologised.

Buffy had hated it. For one thing, Buffy would never have known if Joyce hadn’t told her. For another, she _knew_ that she was sick, that she wasn’t normal – no one could have memories filled with blood, demons and magic and be normal. But Joyce had apologised, and she hadn’t looked at Buffy while she was talking. Her voice had been thin and quiet, and Buffy had known that she was lying. Joyce knew she was sick. Of course she did. She knew it, and she thought that maybe if Buffy shut herself away in a hospital then maybe Joyce wouldn’t have to deal with it. Everything would be okay. Buffy could get well, or be ill over _there_, just so long as Joyce could have her normal life.

Ironically, she hadn’t asked if Buffy had tried not to be the Slayer.

“Yeah, do you expect me to go marching into Division Three and say ‘Hey, I hear you’ve got my mom, give her back or I’ll rain unholy fire down on the lot of you?’ Because that _totally_ isn’t a thing that’s going to happen.”

Walter just continued looking at her, and Buffy wondered who she was trying to fool. “It doesn’t matter what I think. I said it before. I want to know what _you_ are going to do.”

“Leave,” Buffy said, before she did just that.

Angel was somehow already in the hallway. “You okay?”

Buffy nodded, in a way that quite clearly indicated that she wasn’t. Angel nodded once, quickly, letting her know that he’d be with her, and then his gaze flicked over her shoulder.

“So,” Ptonomy said drily, “why do I think that you want to storm the base of a group of militantly mutant hating fanatics?”

Buffy grinned, despite herself. “Because they have my mom. What else am I supposed to do?”

“Well, not go waltzing into the incredibly obvious trap, for starters.”

Buffy shrugged. “You heard what Walter said. They think I’m the World Killer. If I’m busy being all, you know, doom and gloom and totally ominous and stuff, then they’ll probably just hand her over.”

Ptonomy looked at her intently. “You don’t really believe that.”

She let out an explosive sigh. “I really don’t. But it would be pretty cool though, huh?”

“They want you to go rushing in untrained, uncertain. Sure, you slaughtered the squad at the motel, but you don’t know how. Taking on all of them will take a bit more training.”

“Is it just me,” Buffy said slowly, “or are you not saying don’t go and do this suicidal thing so much as you’re saying don’t go and do this suicidal thing right _now_?”

“I’m saying that you need more training.”

“That’s what I said you said.”

“Exactly,” Ptonomy said in a tone of voice that suggested she hadn’t.

“So, uh, what exactly comes next? Because doing a whole training montage thing while they’ve got Mom locked up in some deep dark basement somewhere so doesn’t seem like the me thing to do.”

“Normally, there’d be mind work with Melanie and memory work with me-“

“Oh yeah, you said. Wait, what do you mean, _normally_?”

“Working with Melanie probably isn’t a good idea right now.”

“Why? I’ve had my head shrunk plenty of times before, what’s so different about Melanie?”

“Oliver is her husband. He got lost on the Astral Plane decades ago, and Melanie never really got over it. Since you’re the only person who’s spoken to him in about twenty years, I don’t think that working with her will actually help either-“

“What’s wrong, Buffy?”

Buffy turned to see David standing in the corridor. She wasn’t sure how he’d gotten there – she hadn’t heard him approach. Sure, she didn’t exactly have Slayer senses, but going by the way that Angel was suddenly on guard she could only guess that he hadn’t noticed David either. Sneaking up on a 250 year old vampire was impressive, even if he wasn’t really there.

Buffy was pretty sure that David hadn’t noticed her surprise. He was standing at an angle to her, as though he was ready to leave at any moment, and though he definitely looked concerned, there was something else in his expression that took her a moment to pinpoint. Once she realised that he was uncomfortable talking to her, she felt like someone had punched her in her gut. She’d known David for years. They’d been friends. Sure, they weren’t as close as David and Lenny had been, but those two had come in together, and they’d known each other in the world outside of Clockworks. Buffy and David were friends, and not once, not even in during the bad days, had David ever been uncomfortable around her.

She needed to apologise to him, tell him that last time they’d spoken she’d been suffering from an excess of Caleb in her head, but she wasn’t going to do that with Ptonomy around. “What do you mean, what’s wrong?” Buffy asked gently.

David shuffled his feet, which was apparently difficult enough that it warranted his full attention. “I was, uh, working with Melanie earlier, and she taught me this trick, to keep the voices quiet. Um, it's like there’s a volume switch, like a radio, in my head, and I turn it down so that everything isn’t so _loud_. I was going to see if I could pick up Syd’s voice – uh, her mind – see if I could pick up just that, but then there was suddenly you. You were very loud, and I could tell that something was wrong.” David shrugged awkwardly. “So.”

“You worked with Melanie? Isn’t it still God it’s early o’clock?”

“It is,” Ptonomy said. “But a lot of us aren’t exactly big sleepers around here.”

“Yeah, I know that song,” Buffy replied. She turned back to David, and sighed. “Division Three has my mom, David.”

“Oh. _Oh_.” David’s expression changed, the discomfort melting away. This was the David that Buffy knew, the one that was warm and supportive and always cared. “I’m sorry. Are we going to go and get her back?”

“Yes. Soon. When I’m better. When I know what I’m doing.”

“How can you wait? They’ve got your _mom_. If they had my sister, if they had Amy, I’d-“

“They won’t hurt her,” Buffy said. They probably would have, if they still had Walter. He was the kind of person who would pull wings off of a fly. But they didn’t, and people like Chrissy wouldn’t hurt her. She was human, after all. “It’s a trap. They’re _scared_ of me, and they want to fight me on their home turf.” Technically true, although that was only because Division Three didn’t know that David had been the one to destroy Clockworks. “We aren’t ready.”

“We could be,” David insisted. “I’m learning new things all the time, here. Getting control.”

“Trust me, David. I know what I’m doing.” That was a lie, and Buffy didn’t even believe it herself. “Ptonomy and I are going to go dig around in my memories, see what triggers my power. Once I get the hang of that – they won’t know what hit them.”

“Fine.” David didn’t seem pleased, and he strode off. 

Buffy moved to follow him, but Angel moved into her path. Not that that meant much, given that she could walk through him easily enough. “You’re right. You aren’t ready for Division Three, and you need to get ready. Soon.”

Buffy looked up at him, and wondered what he wasn’t telling her. She knew she’d never get it out of him. When she’d first met him, she’d thought the whole cryptic, mysterious thing was annoying but kind of hot. Now, it was just annoying. “Fine. Ptonomy?”

“That way,” he said, pointing.

Buffy blinked in surprise, then followed him. “What? Do we have to go to a special place, or something? I thought you’d just, I don’t know, touch me and zap me back to my memories.”

Ptonomy shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. When I touch you, I can make you relive your memories, but that doesn’t exactly help. You stop being the you you are now, and you are back then, in the past. Cary built a device that lets me create a sort of museum of memories. You wander around in them, see them from the outside. It stops being so personal.”

“Okay,” Buffy said. “I don’t really get it, but okay.”

“You’ll see in a minute,” Ptonomy said.

Buffy almost wished that she didn’t find that ominous.


	21. Chapter Twenty-One

When Ptonomy had said that Cary had built a machine to help him sort through memories, Buffy had envisaged a helmet with wires dangling from it. She’d expected Ptonomy to take her to some kind of basement, where they’d dredge it up. After all, how often did mutants who needed their memories checked turn up at Summerland? Buffy couldn’t imagine that there were all that many mutants in the world to begin with. Even after all the Slayers had been activated, there’s only been a few hundred of them. She assumed that the amount of mutants was the same.

As it turned out, though, there was no helmet, and there was no basement. There was a room with glass walls, showing a view over the forest. It was sunny, warm, and not all basement-y. Not at all what she’d expected.

The device, if Buffy could even call it that, was a table. It looked, well, it looked like a table. There were chairs, and if they were actually some sort of technology then they were doing a really good job at disguising themselves. The only thing that stopped the table from being the same as every other table that Buffy had ever seen was the fact that it had metal poles sticking up out of it. They were regularly spaced, and made Buffy think of joysticks.

“So, uh, how does this go?” Buffy said warily.

“You sit,” Ptonomy said, doing just that. “Then, if you put one hand of each of these, then-“

“These stick things? That’s it?”

“Yep.”

“Huh.” She was used to magic, which generally needed more elaborate set-up. She sat, and grabbed two of the poles. They were cold against her skin. “Like this?”

“Exactly like that.”

“So what happens-

There was a thrumming sound, not in the air, but in her mind, and suddenly she was somewhere else. She was standing in a desert. There was sand, rocks, straggly plants. There was no table, no chairs, no view over a forest. She flexed her hands, and didn’t feel anything in them. The sun beat down on her, and she looked around, squinting. Ptonomy was standing next to her. He wasn’t looking around. He was looking at her, to see what she did.

“Where are we?” Buffy asked.

Ptonomy shrugged. “It’s your memory.”

“But I don’t remember this. Am I supposed to do what I did in the memory? I don’t know what that is. Or was, I guess. I mean, here is familiar, a bit, but a desert is a desert, and I’ve got a surprising amount of memories of those.”

“You should be here. The you that lived this memory. We should be able to watch. Think of it like a movie, except that instead of sitting in front of the screen, we’re inside it.”

Buffy looked around, trying to find herself. “Do you see me, anywhere?”

Ptonomy paused. “No.”

“I’m guessing that’s not a good thing. I mean, if this is my memory and I’m not even in it, that doesn’t like a thing that’s good.”

“I… don’t know. This has never happened before.” Ptonomy frowned. “This is an important memory, I can feel it, but there’s nothing here.”

“Nothing but sand and rocks and dried-out shrubs. Glad there’s not a shrink around to see this. They’d have a field day,” Buffy said drily. “So, what next? Do you just, like, hold up one of those clacky things that directors have and say ‘Next scene’?”

“Not quite,” Ptonomy replied with a grin.

There was a vibration, although Buffy couldn’t have said what it was that vibrated, and then they were somewhere else.

This time, there was a small room, with curved walls covered in something red and sticky. There was another Buffy, too – she was slumped on the floor, seemingly unconscious. Buffy crouched down and peered closely. It was definitely her. It was surreal to see herself from the outside, to watch herself breathe.

Ptonomy reached out and touched the wall. To her surprise, he didn’t pass through it. His hand came away covered in the sticky red gunk, which he sniffed delicately. “Cherry.”

“We’re under Clockworks. This is where I was, when I woke up.” Buffy looked down at herself. “How are we seeing this? I was unconscious, and there was no light.”

“We’re not really here. Things don’t work in memories quite like they do in the real world. You should know that.”

The past Buffy opened her eyes, and sat up. For a moment, the real Buffy thought that she was going to see herself, but she didn’t. She hadn’t, after all. “In a minute, Willow’s going to turn up. She’s going to be right over-“ Buffy pointed, and sure enough, there was Willow, white-haired and sitting cross-legged on the empty air “-there.”

She watched as Willow and past Buffy bickered about Willow not really being there. “I don’t get it. Why are we here? Why aren’t we outside, when Giles broke the ship, or at the motel?”

“This is important,” Ptonomy said. “I don’t know why, but I was pulled here. There’s something here that’s important, that you need to see. Trust me, when you’ve been doing this sort of thing for as long as I have, you begin to get a feeling for it.”

“Fine,” Willow pouted, “Be that way. I was going to help you out, but if you’re going to treat me like I’m not even here then I might as well go.”

“You _aren’t_ here,” past Buffy said.

There was an audible pop. Buffy remembered that. But, back then, Willow had vanished. 

This time, she didn’t. She just floated around until she was facing the pair, and then she waved cheerily. “Hi!”

“Hi,” Buffy said automatically. “Ptonomy, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” He sounded worried. “This has never happened before.”

Willow tilted her head, and the corners of her eyes wrinkled as she squinted at them. “You’re from the future, right? How’s it going?”

“Did we time travel?” Buffy asked.

“No,” Ptonomy said. “But this is your memory, and she’s someone inside your head. Maybe she’s here, in this memory, and, uh, now, in your mind.”

Buffy frowned. “Was that supposed to make sense?”

“So, how’re you doing, Buff?” Willow asked breezily.

“Um, fine. I guess. How’re you?”

“Oh, you know, same as ever.”

“Cool, cool. So, uh, any chance that you can tell me what my power is and how to use it?”

Willow mulled it over. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Why?”

“Because you aren’t ready yet.”

“I am! I am totally ready. I’m, like, the readiest. If you were to look up readiness in the dictionary, I’d be there.”

Willow looked at her, and the cheery smile dropped from her face. “No. you aren’t. You really, really aren’t. I’m sorry.” Buffy wasn’t quite sure what she was apologising for.

Buffy sighed. “Can you give me a hint or something? This is supposed to be a memory jaunt that’ll help me sort all of this stuff out, but beyond being kind of creepy and totally scrambling my brain, it’s not been much of the helpful.”

Willow looked at her sadly. “Look behind you.”

Buffy instinctively spun around, but there was nothing there. At least, nothing but cherry covered walls. She looked back at Willow, but she was talking to past Buffy again. She knew that she wasn’t going to get anything else out of her.

“Does that mean anything to you?” Ptonomy asked curiously.

“No,” Buffy said slowly. “Wait. Yes. Maybe. There was something, during the battle at the motel. Maybe. Can you take me there?”

Something vibrated, and they were in a church. 

There was Caleb, knife in his hand, dead girl at his feet. In front of him was a group of figures, still as statues, eyeless, scarred. “Any of you got anything to say to the class? I know the devil’s got all y’all-“

“There was something here,” Buffy said. “This was Caleb’s memory, but something was changing it. These things weren’t here, not originally. I heard footsteps – I mean, Caleb heard footsteps, behind him, and he spun around, but the memory ended before I could get a chance to see what it was. Before he could. Whatever.”

“So I guess we turn around.”

“Yeah.” Buffy licked her lips nervously. “Yeah. I guess we do.”

She turned, slowly. She’d wanted answers, sure, but that didn’t mean that she wanted to see what was there. She knew that, deep in her bones. But she needed to know, so she turned, and she dreaded.

It was a standard church, lines of pews, stained glass windows.

The third thing that Buffy saw was that there was a big banner, strung across the whole church. It looked like the kind of thing that schools did for spirit week. It was big, and sickly yellow, and the text was a particularly vivid red.

_YOU SHOULD NEVER HAVE COME._

The second thing that Buffy recognised was that the pews were full, and that each and every person was someone that she knew. There was Celia, seven years old, sitting in the front row. Joyce, in a white shirt and a brown skirt. Anya, blood on her shirt, hole in her chest. Lenny, broken, damaged. Satsu. Xander. Dawn. Everyone that she knew. And they were all dead, and their glassy, lifeless eyes were all focused on Buffy.

But the first thing that Buffy noticed was the figure standing in the aisle.

The figure was tall. It towered over Buffy. It had no neck, no chin, just fat. Its eyes were yellow, like a vampire, and its clothes were tattered and torn. Its arms reached past its knees, and they were thin and spindly. Its fingers were freakishly long, with nails that were closer to talons than anything else. Its skin was pale and waxy.

Buffy had seen creepier demons. If she’d been the Slayer, and she’d had to fight this thing, she wouldn’t have worried. Sure, it was tall, and it had an absurdly long reach, but compared to some of things that she’d seen it wasn’t all that scary.

Except that it was. There was something about it that was just _wrong_, in the same way that the Gentleman and the creepy things that followed them were wrong. There was an almost palpable sense of alienness radiating from the thing, as though the universe itself knew that this was not a thing that should exist, that this was a thing that was _wrong, wrong, wrong_.

Buffy, looking at it, knew two things. The first was that she’d never seen it before. The second was that David had. This was the thing that he’d described to her. The thing that he’d been afraid of. The devil with the yellow eyes.

“What is that thing?” Ptonomy said, his voice strained.

Despite herself, Buffy looked at it closely. “Why isn’t it moving?”

“It’s just a memory. I froze it, so we had a chance to see what it was before it ended.”

“This thing is David’s. He told me about it. He saw it, back at the motel, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the only time. So why is it in _my_ head?”

“I don’t know,” Ptonomy said, clearly unnerved. “We should ask David.”

“Guess so. Can you zap us out?”

Ptonomy closed his eyes, and there was a thrumming sound, which grew and grew until it sounded like something tore apart. Ptonomy’s eyes slammed open. “Something’s keeping us here. Something’s wrong. Whatever you’re doing, stop it.”

“Me? I’m not-“

The devil with the yellow eyes raised a hand, stretched it out to Buffy. There was a pressure in her head, as though there was something inside it that was trying to get out.

All of the corpses that had been sitting in the pews stood up.

“Get us out!”

“I’m trying!” Ptonomy snapped, teeth clenched.

There was a sound, like voices in the distance. Buffy couldn’t make out whose voices they were, or even what they were saying. She got the distinct impression that she didn’t want to. 

She also got the impression that they were getting closer. She didn’t want to be around when that happened.

Although, given that the corpses were standing up and moving towards them, she suspected that they might not live long enough to for that to happen.


	22. Chapter Twenty-Two

A weapon. Buffy needed a weapon. She had years of memories telling her that, when you’re facing a horde of zombies and some kind of demon thing, you couldn’t go wrong with a weapon.

“Do you have a gun?” Buffy asked. She was sure that the answer was going to be no – this was supposed to be a memory, after all, and she wasn’t even sure if Ptonomy could even have brought a gun here. She looked around, hoping to see something, anything, that she could use.

“No,” Ptonomy grunted. His hands were clenched into fists, and his head was low, his knees bent as though he was fighting a strong wind. His face glistened with sweat. “This is your memory. Whatever this is came from you. So _sort it out_.”

Which was easier said than done. Buffy felt as though a star was dying in her mind, burning away everything that was _her_ with it. Fire was lashing at her skull.

She had a headache. It was bad. 

Caleb had a knife. It probably wouldn’t do her much good - it probably wouldn’t even be enough to kill even one zombie – but it was better than nothing. She tried to pry it from his grasp, but she couldn’t even shift his fingers. Ptonomy had frozen the memory, and she couldn’t change it. Not like the devil with the yellow eyes could. 

“Can you unfreeze us?” Buffy said, eyes sweeping over the altar. There were a heavy cross, but not much else. If it came to it, she could try and club her way to freedom. Or she could, if there was anywhere to go.

“Trying. Can’t you feel it? Like there’s a whole world…” Ptonomy’s knees buckled, and he collapsed face first onto the ground.

Fighting was pretty much out. Zombies were hard to kill at the best of times, and these weren’t those. The other option was to escape, which was all well and good, but the zombies were between them and the exit. Even if they could get past them, there was still the devil with the yellow eyes. Its hand was stretched out to her, palm up. Almost like it was offering her something.

Okay. There was a stained glass window behind them. It was high, sure, but if they climbed up onto the altar and jumped, Buffy was pretty sure that they could make it. She crouched down by Ptonomy and shook him. “Come on. Get up! We’ve got to get out of here!”

Ptonomy just grunted at her. Buffy wasn’t sure that he understood. Buffy stood, picked up the cross and hurled it at the window.

The window exploded _inwards_, fragments of glass leaping towards Buffy. She flung up an arm instinctively, ready for the sharp bite of glass in her flesh, but the moment never came. She looked up to see the shards suspended in the air, sending glimmers of light dancing throughout the room.

There was a graveyard outside the church. Buffy could see rows and rows and rows of tombstones, stretching out as far as she could see. Nothing but graves all the way to the horizon. In that moment, she remembered something that Caleb had said to Walter. He’d said that he had a whole world in his head, one filled with all things dark and dead.

Buffy wasn’t surprised to see a hand reach out of the soil in the distance. It was pale, pallid, streaked with dirt. She didn’t need to turn around to know that the zombies were right behind her, hands reaching out to hold and to grasp. There was no escape. Nowhere to escape _to_.

She realised, in that moment, that she was going to die. She was going to die in someone else’s memories, killed by all the people that the Slayer hadn’t been able to save. The irony wasn’t lost on her. 

Buffy closed her eyes, listening to the voices that were just on the edge of comprehension, and waited to die. She took a breath. Breathing was important. Dead things didn’t breathe, and so she was going to do it right up until the point that she couldn’t do it anymore.

She took a breath, and – 

Something pulled her, hard and fast. Her palms hurt as something was yanked out of her hands. For one disorientating moment she thought that she was back on the iceberg again, hanging above the abyss, hands raw and bleeding. But then she crashed against something, hard enough to drive the air out of her lungs. She heard voices. Not inaudible, creepy whispers off in the distance, but real, actual voices. Voices she recognised, speaking words that she understood.

Her eyes slammed open, and there was Rudy up above her, his back to her. David was looking down at her, his face filled with worry. Syd was standing by him, and she looked worried too, although there was an element of confusion to it. There was Melanie, her perennially sad expression tempered by thoughtfulness.

And there was Angel, crouched next to her. When he saw her eyes open, he smiled. “You didn’t really think I was going to leave you in there, did you?” 

Buffy sat up, and immediately regretted it. Her back hurt, and she had a sneaking suspicion that she’d broken her tailbone. She wasn’t sure _what_ had catapulted against the wall, but it had been done with extreme force. Her head hurt, too, but she wasn’t sure if that was because she’d hit it or because she was still feeling the after-effects of whatever the devil with the yellow eyes had done. 

“What happened?” Buffy asked, groggily. “Wait. Where’s Ptonomy?”

“Ptonomy’s over there,” Rudy said, gesturing across the room. On the other side of the room, amongst the legs of the table and the broken remnants of a chair, Buffy could see Ptonomy. Whatever had happened to her had happened to him, too. “In answer to the first question, we were hoping you’d tell _us_.”

“We were doing… what do you call it, memory work? But then there was this, this _thing_, a devil with yellow eyes and, like, an army of zombies, and he trapped us in the church. We were going to die – Ptonomy collapsed, he couldn’t get us out and he collapsed, and there was nothing there, just a dead world, everyone that I ever cared about was dead and they were going to _kill us_.” Buffy took a deep, shuddery breath. “Yeah, basically I don’t know what happened. It’s David’s demon. Ask him.”

Everyone looked at David. David’s eyes were wide, scared. “Er, what?”

Buffy forced herself upright. “The thing, the monster you told me about it the cafeteria. It was in my head. It was just a memory, but it moved, it attacked us. We couldn’t do anything. We aren’t Slayers, we can’t fight things like that. There shouldn’t even _be_ anything like that, not here, not in the real world. So why do you see something like that, and what was it doing in _my_ head?”

“What’s she talking about, David?” Syd said in a brittle voice.

David sighed. “It’s… something I see. Sometimes. I see a lot of things. Melanie said that I’m not sick, that I’m not – that it’s just my brain trying to cope with all the information that my power feeds into it. One of the things I see is a… monster, a devil with yellow eyes. I don’t know what that thing is. Sometimes it’s just _there_. It’s like some nightmare thing, a thing that I see when I’m awake and it – I don’t know what it is. The last time I saw it was at the motel, right before I caught the lightning bolt. I thought, maybe, it was something from Buffy, something I was picking up – she has demons in her head – but she said it wasn’t, and besides, I’ve been seeing it for years. It’s always been around, you know. Lurking.” He looked at Syd. “It scares me.”

Buffy shook her head. “It’s not mine. Definitely not mine. But it was in my head. So, if you could just, like, not go in there, that would be great.”

“Sorry. Don’t really know how I got in.”

Buffy frowned. “Is that why you’re here? Did you, uh, pick up my mind by accident again?” She never would have thought that having a loud mind would be a good thing, but if it had saved her from a zombie horde then it could only be a good thing. 

“Uh, no. Not exactly.” David pointed at Angel. “He told me you were in trouble.”

Buffy glanced at Angel, who shrugged. “_Angel_ told you I was in trouble?”

“Yeah.”

“_Angel_?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, if that’s what he is. He wasn’t exactly doing the introductions so much as the whole urgent thing, you know.”

“But you can see him?” 

David nodded in response. Rudy raised a hand. “We can’t, if that helps.”

“It really doesn’t.”

“Yeah, didn’t think it would.”

“David told us you were in trouble,” Melanie said. “He came to get us, told us you were here. That something had gone wrong, but he wasn’t sure what.”

“I didn’t know,” Angel murmured. “All I knew was that there was something wrong, and I couldn’t do anything. But I knew that he could.”

Buffy opened her mouth to ask him how he’d known, but then changed her mind. The highest amount of psychic energy ever recorded had come from David destroying Clockworks. He caught lightning bolts. A covert military group called him the World Killer. If anyone could help, it would be him.

“We tried to pull you away from the memory machine,” Melanie continued, “but we couldn’t. We couldn’t get close. There was a… shadow, which pushed us away. Rudy had to use his power to pull you free.”

“Um,” David interjected, “it wasn’t a shadow. There were hands. Hands were holding them to the device, and more of them pushed us away.”

“Hands? What kind of hands?” Buffy asked. Even before she’d finished, she knew the answer. “Don’t tell me. They were those creepy hands with the long fingers and the stupidly long nails, right? The devil with yellow eyes’ hands?”

“No. They were ordinary hands. I mean, maybe they were a bit pale, and they were pretty dirty, but they looked like people hands. Besides, you know, the whole thing about them not being attached to anything.”

Right. Pale, pallid hands, streaked with dirt. She’d seen those before, plenty of times. She just didn’t know what they _meant_. “Okay then,” Buffy said slowly. “So my non-existent ex-boyfriend went to get David, because some devil thing from David’s mind was in my head and attacking us. That about the size and shape?”

Everyone looked at each other, then nodded.

“Okay. So, uh, big question here. One I’d kind of like answered, you know. Seems pretty urgent.”

“Go on,” Melanie urged.

“What happens now? Seems like memory work is pretty much off the table, what with my past having more literal minefields in it than I would like, and I, uh, seem to have taken Ptonomy out of action. Again. Sorry about that. I was kind of hoping that I’d be able to get a grip on my powers and storm Division Three, but it kinda looks like that’s a thing that’s not going to happen. So. What now?”

“I’d like to-“ Melanie began, but David interrupted.

“Um. So. Since coming here – since catching the lightning bolt, really, my head has felt different.” David shoved his hands into his pockets and looked intently at his shoes. “Buffy, do you remember Teddy?”

Buffy blinked, thrown by the non-sequitur. “Sure.” Teddy had been an on-again-off-again resident of Clockworks. He’d had obsessive compulsive disorder, and he usually checked himself in for periods of time in the spring, when things were bad for him. “Why?”

“You remember how he always used to touch things, check that they were still around? He used to say that if he didn’t, then the moment he looked away they’d be gone. Someone would whisk them away, and only him touching them could stop it.”

“Sure. It was one of compulsions. What about it?”

“In my head, it feels like all the things I know, all the things that are familiar are just… not there, you know? Like they’ve been moved. Like I didn’t check them, and now they’re gone, and there’s other stuff there instead. I wouldn’t have seen Angel before. I know that. All the things you see, I’ve never seen them. Not till now. Things have moved into different places.” David looked up, and smiled. His eyes were a clear, icy blue. “Things make sense that didn’t make sense before. My power. The things I can do. Melanie said I’m not sick, that all of that was just my power, and she’s right.”

“Okay, sure, that’s great and all – I would _love_ it if things started making sense for me – but how does your head feeling like Teddy’s compulsion actually, you know, _help_?”

“I can do things now. Things I couldn’t do before. I might not have full control _yet_, but I can do things. So, um, if the devil with yellow eyes is in your head, in your memories – maybe I can do something? Fight it? When Ptonomy wakes up, when he’s better, we could go back in. Get some answers.”


	23. Chapter Twenty-Three

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

David looked nonplussed. “Uh… no?”

“So you seriously think that having _you_ go through my memories and hunting some evil thingy from _your_ head is a good plan?”

“I want to say yes, but the way you’re asking kinda makes me think that I should really say no,” David replied. “Why? I can do things, now. I’ve got power.”

“Yeah, and so does Ptonomy, and the devil with the yellow eyes knocked him out cold.”

“I’ve got a lot _more_ power, though,” David said matter-of-factly. “You haven’t seen our muscle, yet. They don’t call me World Killer for nothing.”

“Does anyone call you World Killer at all?” Syd asked.

“No,” Buffy answered. Technically true. In her head, she shouted at David to stay away, to _get out_, and she was inordinately pleased to see him flinch.

“Division Three does,” David said doggedly. “They took readings, there was… some kind of device and – stop that!”

“Stop what?” Buffy said, the very picture of innocence.

“Stop fighting me! I should know these things. I _deserve_ to know these things!”

“If you keep pushing at her mind like that, then we’re going to have a problem,” Angel said. There was no hint of a threat in his voice. It was calm and measured. He wasn’t promising incipient violence if David didn’t stop. It was just a statement, bald and stark.

David held Angel’s gaze for a few seconds before crumbling. “Fine. But you still have to tell us, Buffy.”

Buffy sighed. He was probably right. “Technically, Division Three doesn’t know about you at all. Either of you,” she gestured at Syd. “Well, Walter does, I guess, but he doesn’t really count. But they measured the psychic energy that David gave off when he broke Clockworks, and apparently it’s like _way_ high. Never been seen before, crack the world in half kind of high. They thought it was me, and they called me World Killer. But really it’s David.”

Syd glanced at David. She didn’t seem unduly surprised by the news. For the first time, Buffy wondered what had happened to the two of them during the three days between Clockworks collapsing and their arrival at Summerland. She looked back at Buffy. “Tell me again why you don’t want someone like that to kill your devils for you?”

“Did you miss the part about the army of zombies?” Buffy didn’t mention whatever it was that the devil with yellow eyes had done to her head. For one thing, she wasn’t quite sure how to do it in the first place. It felt like it had twisted something deep inside her head, forcing it to try to escape. In some ways, it had felt similar to Walter psychically boring through her eye. In others, it was totally different. There was no real way to describe it. “Everyone that I’ve ever… cared about was there, broken, bloody, _dead_. Sure, maybe David can fight them. Maybe. But doing something like that takes, well, _world-breaking_ power, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want something like that going on in my head. If you’re feeling lucky, sure, go ahead. Maybe the devil’s in your head too. But I’ll sit that one out, thanks.”

“D’you have a better idea?” David asked. 

Buffy blinked. She hadn’t expected that. “No.”

“Then-“

“No, I don’t. But if there’s going to be a majorly stupid plan going on, then it’s totally going to be _my_ majorly stupid plan. I’ve got a reputation for stupid plans that somehow work out. So I’m going to… go, go away and think and when I come back, I’ll have thought up with something so dumb that no one else would have thought of it.” 

Angel snorted. Buffy held up a hand. “Shut up, you. That’s what I’m doing. If someone can tell me when Ptonomy wakes up, that would be great. Yeah? Yeah. Okay then.”

Buffy walked out of the room. She suspected that everyone was so thoroughly dumfounded by what she’d said that they didn’t have the presence of mind to stop her.

Angel was leaning against the wall in the hallway. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d been in the memory room with the rest of them just a moment ago. He was here now. He just hadn’t crossed the intervening space. “You aren’t the Slayer to them, you know. If you wanted to blow up a library to kill the Mayor with these people, they wouldn’t follow you. You know that, right?”

“Yes. Of course I know that. I’ve blown up their boat and taken Ptonomy out of action twice in, like, less than a week. Not the sort of thing that leads to trust,” Buffy said. “Speaking of trust, you’ve got some ‘splaining to do.”

“Me?” Angel seemed surprised. “You know what I think. What I want.”

“Do I, though? See, I thought the way this thing worked was you show up and ask me to do something, and I say yes, and then you do it. That’s what it was like with Giles and Caleb. Well, technically I didn’t say yes to Giles, but then I was super concussed, and – anyway. You went and found David all by yourself. How?”

“I walked. I heard him, and I moved from where you were to where he was.”

“You know that’s not helpful, right? I’m not asking how you got to him. But you’re a thing in my head. You aren’t supposed to, uh, cross over. How do I know that you didn’t swap places with the devil with yellow eyes or something?”

“You know, this would be a lot easier if you actually paid attention to things that’re right in front of you,” Angel murmured, so quietly that Buffy almost didn’t catch it. “Walter saw Caleb. David saw me. _Everyone_ saw the Bringers, and Giles’ water elemental. We aren’t just in your head, Buffy.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Buffy asked. “Wait. Hold on. Is that about that thing that Caleb said? About me leaking? I’ve got something in my head and it’s oozing out.”

“If you like.” Angel clearly hadn’t liked being implicitly likened to ooze. “We’re here, Buffy.”

“Okay,” Buffy said slowly. “I’ve got an important question. If you don’t answer it, then, uh, there’ll be some shin kicking going on.”

Angel’s eyebrows shot up. “You’ll kick my shins?”

“Yeah. I know that I might not actually, like, _connect_ with them, but the thought’s there, and that’s want counts.”

“Fine.” Angel replied grumpily.

“On the Astral Plane, if I’d have gone looking – would I have found Willow? Or, you know someone else from your world? Or just the world in general, I guess. If I’d gone all Lewis and Clark, could I have found your world?”

Buffy wasn’t sure what she was expecting. Something cryptic, probably, or another question that didn’t actually resolve anything. If nothing else, she’d have guessed that Angel would vanish into thin air without saying a word. What she _didn’t_ expect was a straight answer. Especially not the answer that she actually got.

“No.”

“_Why?_”

“I can’t tell you. Don’t look at me like that. I can’t.”

“Why?”

Angel looked uncomfortable. “Because you aren’t ready to know.”

“Yeah, Willow said that. She was wrong then, and you’re wrong now.”

Angel just shrugged. Buffy wondered how she could have ever found this whole mysterious, cryptic thing to be even slightly hot. Now, it just seemed really, really annoying.

“Listen. I saw my mom just now, in the church, with all the other dead people. She was in the same clothes that she – that she died in, you know, back in Sunnydale. I found her lying there, dead, and she was wearing those clothes, and I will never, ever forget that. And there was Celia, too. She was just a little girl, and she was dead too. But neither of them are dead, here. Mom never had a tumour, Duh Kinderegg never killed Celia. But Division Three is going after my family. They’ve got Mom.” Buffy’s voice cracked slightly. “I saw her dead, again, and there’s a good chance that Division Three might just lose their cool or something if I don’t turn up and they’ll, uh, eliminate the witnesses or something. But here I am, doing the whole dealing thing. Despite the fact that some military goons who work with someone like Walter has my mom, I’m coping. So don’t tell me that I’m not ready to know, that I can’t, like, _handle_ it. Because I can.”

Angel crossed his arms, uncrossed them. Buffy didn’t think that she’d ever seen him fidget before. Vampires were generally very still – when they had nothing to do, they were as still as a corpse. They didn’t get twitchy. “What people say is important, Buffy. The things they say.” Angel didn’t look at her as he spoke. He looked literally everywhere else, but not at her. “You need to listen. To see. I can’t tell you anything because you aren’t ready to know.”

Buffy rolled her eyes. It had been bad enough hearing that sort of thing from Oliver, but he’d been so far out of his head, literally, that he couldn’t even see sanity on a clear day. But this was Angel. While he might not necessarily be the most stable of people, he didn’t generally descend into mystical gibberish. “So what then? I’m just supposed to figure this out? Is this like a scavenger hunt or something? Someone said something to me and it was, what, some kind of _clue_? I’m just supposed to follow along blindly until we get to the point where X marks the spot, only instead of treasure it’s just an answer?”

Angel mulled it over. “Yes. Pretty much. Yes.”

“Well, that’s just _great_, isn’t it? That’s just what I needed. Hey Buffy, you’re a mutant, now run along and do some homework so that you can find out what kind of mutant you are. Who came up with _that_ plan?”

“I’m sorry, Buffy,” Angel said, as though an apology was actual meaningful right then. “I am. But that’s the way that it is.”

Before Buffy could even _try_ to kick his shins, he vanished.

Okay then. She had a puzzle on her hands. Buffy had never been good with puzzles. That sort of thing was normally Giles’ thing, or Dawn’s, or, well, basically anyone but hers. She liked things when they were straightforward. It tended to make things easier to stake.

First things first. What did she know? 

Well, Willow had said that ‘Look behind you’ was supposed to be a clue. But that had led to David’s devil with the yellow eyes, and Buffy strongly doubted that either that thing or David himself had managed to turn her into a mutant. She’d been seeing things since long before she’d met David.

So what else had been behind her that she could have seen if she’d looked?

At that point, Buffy reached the door to her room. She was about to walk in, lie down and think, when she remembered something. In the Astral Plane, a sheet of ice had appeared in her doorway after she’d left her room, stopping her from seeing inside. She hadn’t thought anything much of it at the time, because the room _had_ been stupidly cold, but she’d also got the impression that there’d been something behind it, something moving in the dark. There’d been something that had been left behind, that had been frozen out.

There’d been that message in the cloud world, too, the one that alerted her to the creepy eye thing that held oblivion in its gaze. She’d forgotten about that, mainly because it made virtually no sense and seemed like the kind of thing that would only happen to someone who was on some major drugs. Of course, her mind had just been attacked by Walter, so maybe that was just what happened when he did that. There’d been the whole thing with the breathing and the message that she’d exhaled with her breath. Something about there being a battle that she’d lost, and how she’d had to run away so that she could survive.

Buffy shivered. She remembered thinking – or rather, she remembered the figure made out of cloud thinking that nothing, not even the end of the world, could make it forget the importance of breathing.

Oh. It had literally been right in front of her.

_THERE WAS A BATTLE. YOU LOST. NOW YOU ARE DYING._

_RUN, AND MAYBE YOU CAN SURVIVE._

_“Got a whole world in my head. All things dark and dead.”_

_“We’re here, Buffy.”_

Oliver had asked her, if the world was on fire and she could only save one thing, what would she save? At the time, Buffy had just thought it was the ramblings of someone who’d spent too much time on a plane that was as much dream as it was reality, but now she understood. 

If the world’s on fire, and you can only save one thing, then you save the world.

The thing that was cloud had died in the fire, running away, trying to survive, and Buffy had woken up.

Angel had said that she wouldn’t be able to find his world, and he’d said that they were _here_. 

There’d been a battle, and she’d lost, and she’d run. The world had been on fire, and she’d run away, and she’d taken the world with her.

Buffy had memories of being the Slayer, saw her friends, her family, her enemies, but never, not even once, had she seen the Slayer herself. 

Because she _was_ the Slayer. Had been the Slayer. Until she’d run away, to a plane that didn’t have magic, demons, or vampires, but did have mutants. She’d run away, and she’d carried the world in her head.

In the church, the devil with the yellow eyes had been David’s, but the zombies had been hers. The endless graves, as far as the eye could see, had been hers. She had a dead world in her head. A great, yawning emptiness – the grave of a dead world.


	24. Chapter Twenty-Four

There was a sound behind her. Footsteps, slow and deliberate. 

Buffy hesitated a moment before she turned around. If she’d had to guess who it was, she’d probably say Illyria. Someone who knew what it was to have a world that they could no longer return to. She could imagine the Old One, a glacier in a catsuit, voice dripping with scorn. Yes, if Buffy knew how her mind worked, she’d probably guess that the person behind her was Illyria. 

The problem, of course, was that she _didn’t_ know how her mind worked.

Even so, though her mind told her that it was probably Illyria, the dread deep in her bones told her that it was someone else, some_thing_ else. The devil with yellow eyes, perhaps, or even a vision of whatever it was that killed the world. Her world.

As it turned out, it was none of those things.

It was Chrissy. In the light of the morning sun, her scarf almost looked like it was on fire. Buffy, relieved to see a mutant-hating bigot rather than some kind of eldritch abomination, wondered idly why Chrissy was still wearing it. She had already seen the gaping wound underneath, after all. She doubted that it was a matter of pride – Chrissy didn’t really believe that Buffy was even human. There was no need for pride when talking to something so far below you that it might as well be dirt.

Chrissy brought her hands together in a slow clap. The sarcasm was so strong that it was almost like a physical blow.

Buffy rolled her eyes. “What do you want? Come for some gloatage? I’m sure you would have figured all of this out in, like, a second flat, but then you’re some force of evil from the dawn of time, so you’ve had a bit of a run up.”

“Oh, no. I was just applauding your epiphany. You feel like a solid bar of tension has been lifted from your shoulders, right? You have an answer. Now you _know_. You know what you are, where you came from.” Chrissy’s lips quirked. “You haven’t quite grasped what you’ve left behind just yet, though, have you? A whole world, dark and dead.”

Buffy shrugged. “They seem kinda alive to me. What with the cryptic stuff and stuff. Dead people are generally all with the silence.”

“Oh, but you know what it’s like to have been dead. To put a brave face so that everyone you love,” Chrissy’s face twisted into a rictus of hate, as though anyone who could love and be loved by something like Buffy had to be some abhorrent monster, “doesn’t see the great, aching emptiness in your heart. You know what it is to hide.”

“You know, First, your whole thing would kind of be a better thing if you weren’t wearing Chrissy’s face. I mean, sure, the whole scarf tease thing was pretty effective, but if you’re going to be some goon from this world then you really shouldn’t be saying things like that. There’s no way she would know about that. She hasn’t been in my head.”

“I’ve read your file, remember?” Chrissy replied. “Transcripts, records. Dr Kissinger kept excellent notes. You told him about your deaths. No one asked _you_ if you were ready to be strong. No one ever gave you a choice. That’s the thing about being the chosen one, hmm? You aren’t the one who gets to choose. Ever.”

“Right, yeah, now is there a point to this, or is this just standard villain rambling?”

“You weren’t strong enough,” Chrissy said simply. “You failed, the world died, and you _ran away_. You couldn’t deal with it, couldn’t face it, so you forgot. The world was on fire, and you couldn’t even do the decent thing and remember it.”

“_Excuse_ me? Have _you_ had a dead world in your head? Is there, like, precedent and protocol and stuff? How would I know if I even _could_ remember it?”

“People die.” Chrissy’s voice was matter-of-fact. In that moment, Buffy remembered that Chrissy had introduced herself by her military rank, had made a whole deal about having been military when she was alive. Sure, her entire squad had been murdered by Bringers, but Buffy couldn’t help but think that there’d been other times when Chrissy had lost people in action. No one could hate mutants as intensely as she did without _something_ dark and ominous in their past. “Everyone has ghosts. The least you could do is remember them.”

“You know what?” Buffy snapped. “I _do_ remember them. Do you know how hard it was - _is_ to look my mom in the face and not see her… her sprawled out on the sofa? I’ve relived her dying over and over and over again, and it hurts every time. You know, sometimes I wake up after having some kind of wacky dream and I think, hey, Wills would get a kick out of hearing about it – and then I remember that she doesn’t exist, that I won’t get a chance to tell her. Sure, maybe they’re in my head, but they’re just, like, ghosts or something. My ex just saved me from some evil devil thingy and I couldn’t even hug him, let alone kick his shins.” Chrissy’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “I know they’re dead and all I’ve got are ghosts. But what do _you_ have?”

“Me?” Chrissy’s tone was oddly mild. “Nothing. You took everything that I had. You took my life, my blood, my-“

“See, all you’ve got is hollow words and the slinging of guilt. You were nothing before Caleb, nothing but whispers in the dark.”

“Before Caleb, I was alive.”

“Stop that. You aren’t Chrissy. Stop pretending that you are. You’re just wearing her face, plus the kinda odd addition of a scarf.”

“You’re so sure that you’re right.” Chrissy’s hands curled into fists. Everything about her screamed imminent violence. “Nothing can be your fault, can it, because you-“

“Oh, _shut up_!”

To Buffy’s extreme surprise, Chrissy’s jaw snapped shut with an audible click. Her eyes widened, and a hand reached up to her mouth before she decided that she wasn’t going to give Buffy the satisfaction, at which point she pretended that all she wanted to do was to adjust her scarf. 

“Huh,” Buffy said eloquently. “That’s new.” She’d often told hallucinations to shut up before, and they never did it. They didn’t listen to her – they seemed to have a mind of their own.

Which, technically, she supposed they did.

Chrissy just glared at her.

Buffy made a vague shooing gesture at Chrissy, as though she was a pet that was standing somewhere it shouldn’t. It gave her immense satisfaction to think about treating the First Evil as a truculent dog or something. “Scram. Go on. Get out of here. Scoot.”

Chrissy looked like she wanted to say something – specifically, she looked like she wanted to curse her – but she vanished before she could even try, let alone before she had the chance to make a rude gesture.

Buffy grinned. She felt oddly exhilarated. She’d _done_ something. She had _power_. _She_ had power. Not her hallucinations, not her demons. Just her. She could do things.

Her grin dimmed slightly. Of course, making something that seemed to exist almost entirely in her head go away wasn’t much. It was a start, but if she was going to raid Division Three and get her mom back, then she’d need a lot more than that.

Okay. First things first – she needed something a lot more effective. She couldn’t exactly tell a legion of military goons to skedaddle. If she wanted to do something, then she needed to figure out how to take power from the world in her head. She’d been the Slayer there. Here, the best that she could hope for would be to tap into it somehow.

That wasn’t exactly something that she was keen on. She’d seen graves as far as the eye could see, and dead things reaching up out of the ground. The idea of connecting to that, of linking herself to the dead things, wasn’t something that she felt good about.

The solution, she supposed, would be to tap into someone that Buffy liked. Someone who wouldn’t leave her swamped in some dark alien ocean, like Caleb had. Someone normal – or as normal as someone could be, if they were able to take on an army.

Which basically left Willow, she supposed. She couldn’t think of anyone else who could get into a military base, grab someone, and get out again. At least not someone who wasn’t horrifically evil.

_Oh God Willow was real and Willow was dead and she hadn’t been able to save her-_

No. She couldn’t think about that. Not now. She _wouldn’t_ think about that. She didn’t have the time. She needed to be practical.

Practically, Buffy needed to go somewhere that people wouldn’t mind if she trashed it. Last time magic had happened, a boat had been torn apart. Willow was considerably more powerful than Giles-

-_than Giles had been_-

-so if she was going to try and do battle magic or something, she should probably not just do it in her room. She liked Summerland. It would be a shame if she blew it up. Assuming, of course, that she managed to do anything at all.

She went looking for Cary. Anyone who built the kind of things that he did had to have some kind of secure area to test things. Plus, there was the fact that he might not have heard about the fiasco in the memory room just yet, so he probably wouldn’t ask her what incredibly dumb plan she’d come up with. She wasn’t looking forward to that.

Cary was in his lab, to no one’s great surprise. He looked up when Buffy walked in. “Hello! I was thinking about the cap I made you and, considering the things that Oliver said-“

“Yeah, okay,” Buffy interrupted automatically. She hadn’t come to talk about the things that Oliver had said. A moment later she regretted it, because if there was some new development that meant that she didn’t need to wear the hideous nightcap, she was all for it. But she ploughed on. “I actually wanted to ask if you’ve got, like, somewhere secure. Somewhere that I can go to test something that might be a bit, uh, explosive.”

Cary frowned. “We’ve got a bunker. We built it in case mutually assured destruction stops being, well, mutual. We tend to use it to train people with more aggressive powers. Is that what you’re looking for?”

“Yes! Yes, that would be perfect. Could you tell me where it is?”

Cary opened his mouth to answer – like Giles (_had been_), Cary was the sort of person who automatically answered questions put to them. He had knowledge, and a duty to share it with anyone who wanted it. But then he closed it again, and Buffy sighed inwardly. It looked like questions were coming, and if there was one thing that she didn’t want right now, it was that. If there were questions, she’d have to think about the answers. She’d have to think _period_, which really wasn’t something that she wanted to be doing. “Can I ask why?”

Buffy supposed that she’d better start lying through her teeth. Saying she had a dead world in her head was probably the sort of thing that would go down like a lead balloon. “I feel like, um… it’s kind of hard to explain. Like there’s some things in my head that have moved around, I guess?” Buffy was trying to copy what David had said. She suspected that, if there was anyone here who would understand what he’d been saying, it would be Cary. The problem was that Buffy didn’t really understand what he’d been on about, and she _definitely_ didn’t feel like she knew what was going on. “I guess it’s because the drugs, you know, the things they gave me at Clockworks, have sort of made their way out of my system or something. I feel like things are clearer.” Technically true, if only barely. “But, um, last time I did something I somehow killed a military platoon, and the time before that I blew up a boat. So, I was thinking that going somewhere where I can’t accidentally hurt someone would be a good plan.”

Cary nodded as though that made perfect sense. “Kerry’ll show you the way. This place can be a bit of a maze, if you aren’t used to it.”

Buffy would really have preferred to walk there herself, but she didn’t think that she could say that. 

Kerry appeared from behind Cary’s chair, as though she’d somehow been lurking there without Buffy seeing her. Buffy blinked. Even with all the things that she’d seen, that still weirded her out. Kerry nodded at the door. “Come on then, let’s go.”

Buffy followed her out.

“So,” Kerry said idly, “what do you think’ll happen?”

Buffy had hoped that Kerry wouldn’t ask her any questions. It wasn’t an unreasonable hope – the girl tended towards the terse – but apparently the possibility of things exploding caught her interest. “Honestly? I’m hoping for big balls of magical fire.”

Kerry nodded, as though she had never expected anything else. Thankfully, that seemed to be the end of her questions.

A few minutes later, after following a path that Buffy didn’t fully understand – they seemed to have moved through at least two buildings, past one pond filled with fish, and across a miniature bridge that spanned a sluggish stream about a foot wide – they arrived at a door bearing the enigmatic legend of BUNKER.

Kerry entered a brief code on a pad next to the door, which Buffy didn’t catch, and the door swung open.

The room was much more in keeping with what Buffy had expected Summerland to be, back when she’d first heard about it. Beyond something that resembled a shooting gallery but without all the cubicles, the room was empty. Although someone had obviously tried to keep it clean, they didn’t seem able to do anything about the scorch marks that dotted the floors, walls and ceilings.

“You want me to stick around?” Kerry asked. Though she was trying not to show it, Buffy could tell that she was excited by the prospect of magical fireballs.

“Nah. I’m not sure anything will actually happen, and I wouldn’t want to bore you by holding out my hands and yelling ‘fire’.”

“Is that how it works?”

“I hope not,” Buffy said, grinning despite herself, “otherwise I’d look totally ridiculous.” 

Kerry returned her grin. “Well, I guess I’d better leave you to it then.” She left.

Buffy turned to face the targets, and took a deep, shuddery breath. “Well, let’s get this show on the road.”


	25. Chapter Twenty-Five

Buffy thrust out a hand. “Fire!” 

Nothing happened. Buffy wasn’t particularly surprised. While her voice had started out strong, it had ended with a sheepish quaver. Magic wasn’t normally her thing. She was good at hitting things. Hurling fire wasn’t really her wheelhouse. 

She was glad that Kerry hadn’t stuck around. The process was embarrassing enough without someone watching her. Buffy had even looked for hidden cameras – she’d doubted that Cary, when presented with the possibility that something might explode, would just leave her unobserved. But apparently he had. There weren’t any cameras that Buffy could see, hidden or otherwise. It seemed like what happened in the bunker stayed in the bunker.

Buffy tried to remember what ‘fire’ was in Latin. Latin was a good language for witching in. Buffy vaguely thought that it might be ‘iguana’, but that seemed unlikely even to her. Although it might explain why all the Latins had died out – confusing fire with a lizard might do that to you.

Apparently, yelling fire wasn’t going to cut it. Buffy almost wished that Willow was around, so that she could just ask her outright what she should do. But she was alone. It seemed like she needed to rely on herself.

Maybe the problem was that Willow didn’t generally throw fire around like it was nothing. Not even after the Slayer activation spell, when her powers had increased exponentially. That sort of thing was a last resort, got-to-deal-with-an-Old-One type of thing. Buffy closed her eyes, and tried to imagine the mental state that you’d be in at a time like that.

She hadn’t expected it to be particularly hard – having an army steal your mom tends to focus you on the doom and gloom side of things – but her thoughts just kept slipping away from it. She kept thinking about Willow and Tara, and what Willow had been like after Glory had brain-sucked her girlfriend. She thought about someone she loved being taken away and hidden from her.

In that moment, Buffy wanted to go home so fiercely that it hurt. She wanted to go home, where everything was normal and no one was keeping things from her. There weren’t these constant obstacles. There weren’t other people in her head. There was just her, and everything was fine, everything was good. Everything in her just wanted to go home, to go back to when she had power, when she could make choices.

Buffy opened her eyes and stomped her foot. It wasn’t _fair_. Division Three had her mom, and they weren’t doing the decent thing and just handing her over. It was like they _wanted_ her to kill them.

There was a blur, and suddenly Buffy was standing in front of one of the targets. Her hand snapped up, slamming clean through the dummy. Plastic shards sprayed out as the dummy collapsed. Buffy didn’t care. The dummy was just a thing, and it hadn’t even had the courtesy to burst into flames when she’d asked it to.

Well, she’d show those goons. Teach them they shouldn’t steal from her. She was so far above them, so much better than them, that they should be proud just to be standing on the same ground that she deigned to touch. 

But first she needed to know where they were. Buffy briefly toyed with the idea of asking Kerry, but she knew that the other girl wouldn’t tell her.

Buffy turned, eyes sweeping across the wall. She hadn’t noticed before, but there was a subtle change in the texture and coloration. In that moment, she was absolutely certain that Kerry was watching her through some kind of one-way wall. 

Buffy waved at her cheerfully. It wasn’t Kerry’s fault that she was all wrapped up in the body of someone else. She hadn't asked to be trapped in someone else’s body, or be forced to share a life.

But there was someone else that she could ask. Someone with an ugly rumpled brown suit and an air of incredible arrogance that just didn’t suit him.

Almost before she had a chance to finish the thought, Buffy was outside. There was the pond with gaping fish looking up at her as though they’d never seen anything quite as flawless (they hadn’t). 

Something was wrong. There was a little voice in the back of her head, droning on about how this wasn’t her, how she didn’t think like this, how she didn’t punch hard enough to destroy plastic dummies or move as fast as thought. It was annoying, and Buffy resolved to ignore it. It was just a small, whining whisper. She was so much _more_ than that.

Buffy looked down at the fish, which looked up at her. After a moment, she noticed her reflection in the surface of the pool. There must have been a breeze that she didn’t feel, because something was rippling the water’s surface – her hair looked like it was wavy.

Oh well. There would be time for a makeover later. For now, she had a mutant to see about a military base.

She moved, and a moment later she was in Walter’s room.

Walter paused for a fraction of a second when she appeared, and then went on whittling. His little sculpture had a distinctive shape, now. There was an orb, with small, faint lines engraved into it. It took her a moment to realise that the lines formed continents, and the orb was a rough depiction of the globe. 

The reason that it took her so long to realise that was because the globe was being gripped by something. Although it was unfinished, Buffy was easily able to recognise a hand, palm upwards, with fingers curled around the world. For an idle moment, she wondered whose hand it might be, but then she realised that she didn’t really care.

“So,” Walter said conversationally, “have you decided what you’re going to do?”

“Where’s Division Three?” Buffy asked. “Where’s my mom?”

Walter shot her an amused look. “Why are you asking me?”

“Because you know the answer,” Buffy said, rolling her eyes. “_Duh_.”

Walter’s lips narrowed into a thin line. “But aren’t you worried that I would lead you into a trap?” His voice lingered lovingly on the last word. “I’d have thought that you’d ask Cary instead.”

“I’m asking you. So if we could skip the games and get to the point, that would be great.” Buffy really didn’t feel like she had either the time or the inclination to indulge in Walter’s mind games. She wanted to go home. There was a yawning emptiness inside her, like there was something missing – she didn’t know what it was, but she knew that she’d only be full again once she got home. “So, once more but with answering – where’s my mom?”

“Did something happen to Cary?” Walter asked. “Did you do something? I can’t help but notice that you’ve done something with your-

Buffy lost her patience. She’d had it with people hiding things from her. She shot a glance at the handwritten sign, taped to the empty air, that told her not to cross the line. She looked at it, and decided to ignore it. She took a step forward, and-

She was in a forest. Trees towered above her. They were so tall that she couldn’t even see their tops. They blocked out the sky. Sunlight gradually filtered past the leaves – by the time it reached her, it was a dark, murky green. She could hardly see.

But there was just enough light to see the thorns that were strung between the trees. They were vast – the smallest thorn she could see was as long as her hand – and they were so thick that she couldn’t see the other side.

Buffy shrugged. She wasn’t going to be defeated by a plant, not matter how pointy its thorns. She was so much better than that. She wasn’t going to give Walter the satisfaction of seeing her retreat. Besides, she wasn’t even sure if the thorns were even real. She doubted it.

So she pushed forward. Though the thorns got caught in her clothes, and snagged her hair, they couldn’t seem to penetrate her skin. The whisper at the back of her mind asked her if she found anything odd about that, but she ignored it. In any case, she was in a forest that almost certainly wasn’t really there. For all she knew, that’s what the thorns were supposed to do.

The thorns grew tighter and tighter, winding around her like snakes. They were trying to strangle her, but she fought on. She wouldn’t be beaten, not by this. She fought on, and-

-she was on the other side. Buffy took a deep breath, unrestricted by thorns. Her clothes were torn, and her hair was a mess. She grinned triumphantly. She’d won. “So then. For the last time. Where’s Mom?”

Though Walter’s seemed surprised to see her – he obviously hadn’t expected her to make it through – he shook his head. “No.”

“What do you mean, no?” Buffy pouted. “I didn’t ask you a yes or no question. That doesn’t even make _sense_.”

“I won’t tell you,” Walter said plainly. “You’ve got power, find out for your-“

Buffy reached out and grabbed him by his shirt and lifted him into the air. Instantly he lashed out with his knife, but Buffy caught his wrist with her free hand. Both Walter and the whisper at the back of Buffy’s mind seemed surprised by this – Walter was several inches taller than her, and a good deal heavier, but even though he was straining to reach her, her grip stopped him dead. Her arm didn’t so much as bend.

“I _am_ finding out,” Buffy replied brightly. “You just aren’t cooperating.”

Buffy could feel something trying to burrow through her eye socket, trying to worm its way into her head. Walter’s brow was furrowed in concentration. Buffy just smiled, and in her head she imagined her foot, clad in a beautiful stiletto. She brought it down on the wriggling, grub-like thing that was Walter. It convulsed once, then curled up and was still. 

Walter twitched violently, and then went slack. Buffy dropped him. He crumpled bonelessly at her feet.

Buffy crouched down beside him. “One last time. For real, this time. Where’s Division Three?”

In a quiet monotone, Walter told her. Buffy smiled.

Behind her, the door slammed open. Kerry burst through, sword in hand. Rudy followed after her. Kerry’s eyes darted around the room, taking in the scene. “Buffy,” she said, her voice low and urgent, “what did you do?”

“Me?” Buffy shrugged nonchalantly. “I just asked him a question. He didn’t want to answer.”

“Is he dead?”

Buffy shrugged again. “Don’t know. Now, if we’re done with the whole inquisition thing – would you mind getting out of my way? I’ve got a rescue mission to go on.”

“Not until you tell us what you did.”

Buffy’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think you understand. In a few moments, I’m going to leave through that door. I don’t really care if you’re in my way or not. I’m just telling you what’s going to happen.”

Kerry settled into a fighting stance. “Is that a threat?”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Oh, goody. Macho posturing. My favourite.” She moved forward.

Instantly, Rudy raised a hand. Buffy felt herself rising off the ground. 

Well, that wouldn’t do. Wouldn’t do at all. She lashed out, kicking a table. It flew across the room. There was a flash, and for a fraction of a second it vanished. But then it reappeared – for a moment, it seemed to be trailing broken thorns, but then the moment passed and there were no thorns to be seen. Kerry dodged it, but Rudy wasn’t fast enough. It slammed into him, knocking him off his feet.

Buffy dropped to the floor. She was moving almost before she hit the ground. Kerry snapped a kick out at her, but the girl seemed to be moving in slow motion. Buffy easily stepped around her. She walked out of the room without a backwards glance, and a moment later she was outside.

Finally, she had a plan. Something she could do. Buffy looked down at herself, and then frowned. Of course, she’d needed to get her clothes sorted out first. She couldn’t raid a military base dressed in rags. There was such a thing as style, after all.


	26. Chapter Twenty-Six

Buffy couldn’t remember the last time that she’d been shopping. She’d been in a psychiatric hospital for the last few years – Clockworks wasn’t really the place for that sort of thing. She couldn’t remember the last time that she’d gone out and looked at clothes and shoes, or got her hair done, or anything.

That said, she was sure that there hadn’t been quite as many people looking at her as there was now. Or maybe there had been, but only because she'd been a beautiful young girl. They certainly hadn’t looked at her like she was something that had been dragged through a bush. Pretty much everyone was looking at her as though they couldn’t quite believe that security had let her through. 

Of course, security hadn’t actually seen her come in. Even if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to stop her.

So Buffy just smiled, acknowledging the looks. She arched her eyebrows, telling everyone who cared to look that yes, she was a mess, and yes, there was quite a story behind it all – and no, none of them would ever get to hear it.

Buffy picked up several dresses and an array of shoes and moved towards the dressing room. She knew that nothing she’d chosen was really all that practical – she wouldn’t be able to kick anyone without tearing the fabric, and heels totally weren’t the thing for military raids – but she looked so cute in them that she just couldn’t bring herself to care. Plus, it wasn’t as though it really mattered. Division Three was full of humans, and she was so much _more_ than that. She could shuffle in wearing a dressing gown and slippers if she wanted, and still kick everyone’s ass. She had the power. 

But she wanted to look beautiful. She wanted to _feel_ beautiful. It had been a really long time since she had. For years, now, Buffy had felt as though she was just a meat suit for a sick brain. But things were different now. 

It was a shame that she didn’t have the time to go for something tailored for her, or get her hair done. She’d really like to get her nails sorted out, too – it had been years since she’d had a good makeover, and really, she felt that she deserved it. The world owed it to her. Settling for off-the-rack was not a good feeling.

But sadly some hate group or whatever had stolen her mom, and even though it wasn’t likely to be any trouble to get her back, Buffy didn’t want to procrastinate. The frigid emptiness inside her meant that she wasn’t going to get any real enjoyment out of this anyway. It all seemed... superficial. It skimmed across the surface and did nothing for the hollowness underneath.

It said a lot about her life that it was still the happiest that she’d been in years.

Buffy walked into the changing room and examined the clothes she’d picked out. She selected a slinky red dress and tried it on. To her surprise, it fit her to perfection. She ran her hands over it – it felt like heaven against her skin. Ah, but it had been so long since she’d had anything nice!

Her expression soured. It had been years since she’d had anything at all.

She looked in the mirror, wanting to check if she looked as good as she thought she did. 

She did, of course. Oh, her hair was a tangled, wavy mess that looked like it would eat combs whole, but other than that she looked just divine. 

Buffy blinked and looked closely at the mirror. She opened her eyes wide, and sighed. Her eyes had changed colour again. There was more blue in them than there really should be. They looked almost grey. She wondered why. She couldn’t really keep track of what her eyes were doing at any given time. The voice at the back of her head pointed out that it was because she wasn’t wholly Buffy, but she ignored it. She’d been just Buffy in the Astral Plane, and her eyes had been way creepier there than they were now. Maybe she just had changeable eyes. She couldn’t really tell. Besides, it wasn’t like it really mattered. She sat down and tried on a pair of shoes.

When she looked back up, there was writing on the mirror. It looked like someone had breathed on it and written something in the vapour. Buffy found that she couldn’t really read what it said. For one thing, moisture had dripped over the letters, smearing them. For another, Buffy couldn’t quite tell what the letters were. She wasn’t even sure if they were English.

_γɿolϱ_

It looked all Greek to her. She didn’t know what to make of it, and so she added it to the long list of things that she didn’t understand. 

Some time and many outfits later, Buffy had made her selection. She walked over to the counter.

Suddenly everyone stopped moving. Some people froze with one foot in the air, balanced precariously between steps. The guy at the check-out stood stock still, the till open in front of him. Someone could just reach right in and take the money – or they could, if they weren’t frozen in place.

There was a presence in Buffy’s mind, too. Something separate from the annoying little whine. Someone was looking for her. 

The moment passed, and the presence moved on. Everyone resumed their lives like nothing had happened. 

Buffy smiled. David could look for her all he liked. He wouldn’t find her, not like that.

Buffy moved over to counter, caught the eye of the boy behind it. He had a confused look in his eyes, obviously wondering what someone with torn clothes and wild hair was doing buying clothes in a place like this.

Buffy didn’t notice. She’d suddenly seen that there was a candle in the checkout guy’s head. She could see it dancing behind his eyes – his pupils, which should have been dark, were actually tunnels lit by a flickering flame. He opened his mouth to say something to the customer in front of her, and Buffy could see fire dancing at the back of his throat. 

Buffy found herself leaning towards him, trying to get close to the flame. She was cold, so very cold. She reached out to warm herself. In that moment she was sure, absolutely certain, that she could pull the fire into herself, that it would fill the emptiness inside of her. That she could be warm and whole. At least for a while, until she was home again.

The boy saw the hungry expression on Buffy’s face. He flinched, and turned away. No longer face-to-face with the candle behind his eyes, Buffy realised that she couldn’t just reach in and pull fire out of someone’s head. There couldn’t really have been fire inside him to begin with. It had to have been David affecting her, or something. Yes. That was it. It couldn’t have been anything else.

Nevertheless, Buffy left, so quickly that no one saw her go. In any case, she’d realised that she didn’t have the money to pay for anything. That was the only reason that she left so quickly.

Well. She’d had her fun. If it could even be called fun. Now she had to go.

~*~

Running was strange, Buffy reflected. It was like the world stood still. She was only thing that moved, the only thing that was alive, the only thing that was _real_. The rest of the world was filled with statues. As she ran, she saw cherry blossoms hovering in the air, just waiting for the time to fall. But there was no time. Or, rather, there was just an eternal moment that kept dragging on. Her time. Her moment.

She didn’t need to rush. She could amble over to Division Three in high heels. They couldn’t prepare for her. She was a blur, faster than the eye could see.

Nevertheless, she ran. They had Joyce. All that stood between her and going home was rather a lot of distance, a few moments, and an army. The distance was no obstacle at all.

As she arrived outside of Division Three, Buffy couldn’t help but think that the army wouldn’t be much obstacle either.

Of course, the building looked intimidating. With barbed wire, sentry towers and tall, forbidding walls, it looked exactly like a military base of a hate group should. It looked intimidating – but Buffy had seen things that were much, much worse than this. 

She leapt, her momentum easily taking her up and over the wall. She grinned. She would have laughed out loud, if it wasn’t for the fact that some small part of her knew that she should at least _try_ to be stealthy. This was what it felt like to be the Slayer. This grace, this _power_. She’d leapt over the school gates so many times, back in Sunnydale. Of course, this wall was higher, and she was moving much faster, but the principle was the same. 

To one side, she saw a guard in a tower, rifle in hand. He was watching the approach to the base, eagle-eyed, ready to fire at a moment’s notice. It wasn’t his fault that he hadn’t seen her. She was moving as fast as thought. She raised a hand to wave at him. Not because he would see it, but because it was funny. Like waving to an animal in a zoo, knowing that they have no idea what you’re doing.

She raised her hand to wave, but for a moment the light from the noon sun caught his goggles, and the soldier looked like his eyes were on fire. Buffy swallowed hard, the hilarity of the moment vanishing in a moment. She remembered the boy with the candle in his head, and the hunger deep inside her gut. The hunger was still there, roiling away inside of her. She yearned to be full. To be warm.

As graceful as her jump had been, her landing was quite the opposite. She was distracted. Her ankle twisted, and she stumbled. Her heel, not built for that kind of thing, snapped underneath her. Buffy let out a small yelp of surprise and almost fell over. She windmilled her arms wildly, trying to keep her balance.

After a moment, she straightened. She bent down to yank the broken heel off of her shoe. When she stood up again, Chrissy was standing in front of her. She was wearing tactical gear, gun at her belt, helmet tucked under her arm. There was no sign of her red scarf – Buffy supposed that her gear had to be tight enough around her neck to stop it from oozing blood. She looked like she was about to laugh.

“What are you doing here?” Buffy snapped. “Didn’t I tell you to go away?”

“Where else would I be?” Chrissy spread her arms wide, taking in the compound. “We have nowhere else to go.”

She dropped her arms, and suddenly the courtyard was filled with soldiers. Not because they’d come pouring out of the compound, alerted to Buffy’s presence by some kind of alarm. They were just there. They hadn’t been a moment ago.

Unlike the soldier that Buffy had seen in the tower, they didn’t look particularly well. Their gear was torn and bloody. Buffy could see wounds that put Chrissy’s to shame. In short, they looked like a group that had run into some Bringers, and hadn’t come out of the encounter whole. Nothing could look like they did and be alive.

Buffy sighed. “Yeah, yeah. I know you’ve got a whole thing for theatrics. But if you could not be an over-the-top drama student, like, _right now_…” She strode forward, sure that the soldiers wouldn’t bar her way.

Chrissy let out a bark of laughter, harsh and completely devoid of mirth. “Oh, Buffy, you should really pay more attention.”

Buffy shot her a look as she passed. “Why? You’re totally boring. You just do the whole villainous thing all the time and it’s just so _done_, you know? It’s like-“

“Why? Well, for one thing, while you were listening to me chatter, and while you were distracted looking at your ghosts, you slowed down enough for the snipers in the towers to notice you.” Chrissy raised a hand. A moment later, she closed it in a fist. At the same time, the courtyard was filled with the sound of gunfire.

Something hit Buffy. She wasn’t sure where it had come from. She wasn’t even sure where she’d been hit. The only thing she knew was that she felt like someone had taken a drill to her, and poured molten steel in the hole left behind. She felt like she was burning from the inside out.

_You hear the sound of the gun firing before you even notice it in his hand. You’re taken by surprise – Warren’s just a human, he shouldn’t be so fast._

The impact was enough to drive Buffy backwards. Already unbalanced by her uneven heels, she wasn’t able to stay upright.

_You know that you’ve been shot. You can feel the pain blossoming in your chest, a dark crimson flower. The smell of blood fills your nostrils. Despite the pain, you find you don’t much care. The sun is so very warm, and the summer flowers are beautiful._

Buffy lay on her back. She felt like she’d been hit so hard that her bones had been pulverised. She took a breath, and was surprised that her ribs didn’t crumble away like dust in the wind. There was another shot which narrowly missed her head. Buffy flinched, breath coming hard and ragged. Her eyes were unfocused, staring at nothing. The sun was warm against her skin.

_You aren’t afraid. You should be – after everything you’ve done to keep yourself from dying, you should be terrified now that there’s an actual bullet in your chest. But you just can’t bring yourself to be afraid._

Buffy had to move. She had to get away, otherwise they’d just keep firing until there was nothing left of her, nothing but a bloody smear across the courtyard. She couldn’t help but think that there probably wasn’t much more to her than that now. She didn’t have much time.

_Xander’s above you. Though the blood pulsing in your ears prevents you from hearing what he’s saying, and the bile in your throat is making it difficult to breathe, you can tell that he’s worried. You dimly realise how strange it is that you aren’t. You’re much more interested in the gentle breeze that caresses your skin, and how beautifully blue the sky looks above you. It’s such a shame that it’s getting dark._

Buffy rolled over onto her hands and knees. Another bullet hit her in the thigh, and she buckled. She sprawled face-first in the dirt

_Though your vision is fading, you still see Xander’s face morph into someone else. An older person, bespectacled and grim. When he speaks, his voice is quiet and level. It cuts through your mind like a knife. Somehow, it is louder even than your failing heart labouring away inside you._

_“She’s a hero, you see. She’s not like us.”_

_Giles reaches down to cover your nose and mouth. You twitch and struggle, but he’s as implacable as a sunset._

Through gritted teeth, Buffy hissed with pain as she levered herself to her feet. Dimly, she could see the men in the tower, ready to fire again. She knew that, if they got did, she wouldn’t get up again. 

She wasn’t going to die. She wouldn’t allow it. Not here. Not like this. She stumbled on uneven feet until she got to the base of the tower. She pressed herself against it. They had no clear shot on her there. She would be fine if only she could catch her breath. She’d be ready to fight, then. They’d caught her by surprise. Now that she was ready, oh, she’d be glorious.

She slumped down, legs no longer able to support her. She didn’t notice. The sky was so very blue, and the sun felt so warm against her face.

It was such a shame that it was getting dark.


	27. Chapter Twenty-Seven

She sat with her back to the wall. The wind played with her hair, and whispered something that she couldn’t quite catch. The sun shone down on her, and on her eyelids there danced a bright red script that she couldn’t read. Her shoulders ached from the cold that seeped through from the stone behind her.

Most of her ached, if she were honest. She felt like she’d fallen off a building. Every bit of her felt bruised. She was so sore that she felt like her dress was sandpaper against her skin. At least, the parts that didn’t feel uncomfortably sticky. The air was filled with an unpleasant metallic smell, and she couldn’t help but feel like it was coming from her.

She couldn’t remember why she ached. She wasn’t entirely sure _who_ she was, either. She didn’t know where she was.

There was a clinking sound, and then footsteps, slow and deliberate. She might not know who she was, or where she was, or why she was there, but she definitely felt like the footsteps would require her to know.

In a feat of strength to rival Hercules, she opened her eyes. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She wondered briefly if they were saltwater, or something else entirely. A moment later, she wondered why she’d thought that.

There was a man in tactical gear standing in front of her. He had a gun at his belt, a helmet on his head. Everything about him was tense, as though he was ready to pounce. He moved like a cat stalking his prey.

He squatted down in front of her with a suddenness that made her flinch. “You alright, miss?”

She frowned, and then immediately regretted it as the movement sent ripples of pain rebounding through her head. It seemed like a stupid question to her. Of course she wasn’t okay. She was bruised and bloody and broken. “Not really.”

It was only when she heard her voice that some memories began coming back. As weak and as cracked as it was, she recognised her voice. It was great at being flippant at times when it really shouldn’t be. No. _She_ was great at being flippant. Her. The Slayer.

Her name escaped her for a moment, before the word Buffy drifted across her consciousness. Given that it definitely didn’t seem like a word, she suspected that it was a name. Her name. It definitely felt like her name. At the very least, it ended in a ‘y’, which she strongly suspected that her name should. On the other hand, some small part of her thought that her name might end in ‘us’, but that would lead her to Buffus, which sounded even more ridiculous than Buffy did.

So, she was Buffy, then.

The soldier nodded, as though he hadn’t expected any other answer. “Do you know about mutants, miss?”

Buffy was about to nod, before she realised that doing so would probably lead to her head falling off. Instead, she croaked “Yes.”

“One of them must’ve kidnapped you. Oh, nasty piece of work, she was. Moved like nothing I’ve ever seen. But she got away… somehow, and left you behind.”

Buffy blinked blearily. That didn’t sound right. She was a mutant. She knew that. The other mutants she knew wouldn’t leave her behind. She knew that too. 

She remembered leaping over walls as though they were nothing. She’d been an exhilarated blur. And then…

There’d been bullets, and confusion, and she hadn’t been prepared, hadn’t been ready. Someone had been shot, and she could only assume that it was her. 

“Okay.” Her voice was uncertain, as though she didn’t really understand what the soldier was telling her. She didn’t, of course, but not for the reasons that the soldier probably assumed.

“Do you remember what happened?”

“There was… gunfire?” It was a safe bet. “I don’t really know. I was-“ _trying to throw fireballs_ “-in the, uh, gym, and then – I don’t know. I was here.”

The soldier stood stock still. And for a moment Buffy was sure that he’d see through her pathetic lie. He’d compare her, in her bloody, torn dress, to the mutant that had attacked the base, and he’d realise that they were one and the same.

But he didn’t. “What’s your name?”

She began to say ‘Buffy’, before she remembered that these people thought that she was the World Killer. Buffy wasn’t exactly a common name. Instead, she said ‘Anne’, choosing a name that she’d used before. She could confidently answer to that and not forget that it was supposed to be her. What she actually said, however, was “Ben.” She shrugged, hoping to convey ‘it is what it is’, rather than ‘I definitely made that up on the spot’.

The soldier took it in his stride. “Well, sir, there are a few people who would probably like to have a word with you, and then we’ll get you cleaned up and sent home. How does that sound?”

It sounded like a monumentally bad idea, not least because she didn’t believe a word of it, but there wasn’t much that she could do about it. “Um, cool.” She moved to stand up, but didn’t get very far before her body flat out refused. “I’m gonna need a hand up.” Buffy rasped.

“The mutant really did a number on you, huh?” The soldier hooked one of Buffy’s arms around his neck, and grasped her by the waist before pulling her upright. Although she gasped in pain as a series of small grenades went off inside her, she was concentrating far more on what he’d said. She didn’t understand why he hadn’t seemed to realise that the mutant and her were the same person.

Then she looked down – or, more accurately, her head lolled forward without the support of the wall she’d been leaning against – and she saw the answer, spelled out in drops of blood.

_glory_

An image flashed through her head. She supposed that it was a memory, although she wasn’t entirely sure that it was hers. She remembered breathing on a mirror and tracing a message in the condensation. Not a long message. Just a single word. The same word, in fact. 

The hand that had traced the message had been like her hand, she supposed. She knew what her hand looked like – she knew it like the back of her hand. It had been almost the same as her hand. It had, in fact, looked exactly like her hand would look if it was reversed in a mirror.

She supposed that she shouldn’t be surprised by the whole Glory thing – she didn’t know anyone else who moved faster than the eye could see, hit like a wrecking ball on steroids, and would absolutely take time out from the end of the world to buy pretty clothes. But she was. She realised that she hadn’t been thinking like herself – she had even _known_ that she wasn’t thinking like herself, she’d tried to warn herself about it – but it had felt so natural at the time that she hadn’t even questioned it. That was the thing about Glory, she reflected. She was completely and utterly secure in herself. She couldn’t help but think that she was right, and by definition everyone else had to be wrong.

Being Glory had almost certainly saved her life, though. The whole thing she’d had with Ben, where no one had been able to remember that they were sharing a body, was probably the only the thing that had stopped this soldier from shooting her when he found her.

Although, of course, Buffy wasn’t quite sure how bullets had managed to hurt Glory in the first place.

Buffy barely had to pretend to stumble in order to scuff out the message on the floor before the soldier could see it.

“We’d best get you to the HM,” the soldier murmured, as they staggered towards the door.

“Her Majesty?” Buffy asked deliriously. “We’re going to see the Queen?”

The soldier chuckled. “Nothing so exciting. HM stands for Hospital Corpsman. Our doctor.”

Buffy thought about commenting on how that should probably be HC instead, but found that she really couldn’t be bothered. For one thing, she’d never really cared about military chains of command. For another, when he’d laughed, the sunlight had caught his goggles for a moment, making his eyes look like they were on fire.

They still looked like they were on fire, in fact. The only difference was the goggles were lit from within.

“Can I ask you a question?” Buffy said. She was surprised. She hadn’t been planning to speak. She hadn’t even had a question on her mind – at least, not one that could answered by him. But the question tumbled past her lips anyway.

“Sure,” the soldier said, as guardedly as only someone who worked for a secret military organisation could.

“Aren’t you afraid that it’ll go out?”

The soldier looked down at her. Although his helmet obscured all expression, she knew that he was confused. Or maybe she was merely seeing her own expression mirrored in his goggles, backlit by flames. “What?”

“The candle in your head.”

Her hands began moving without any conscious command on her part, snaking up to grab the sides of his head. He tried to drop her and step away, his hand reaching for his gun, but he was too slow. She had a grip on his head and she wasn’t going to let go. 

Her fingers slid in through his helmet like it wasn’t even there, slid in through his skull to grasp the fire directly. He screamed, a wordless, high-pitched wail. Buffy cried out too, her cheeks flushing. She twitched as warmth flooded through her, from the tips of her fingers to the very core of her being, leaving behind a kind of ecstatic fuzziness in its wake. She’d never felt anything like that. Not even close.

She wasn’t sure how long they stood like that. She only had the faintest sense of herself. There was nothing but the warmth and the rush. She felt whole again, complete in a way that she never had before. She felt like parts of her that she hadn’t even known existed, both brain and body, had been activated.

But, eventually, the moment past. Sated, Buffy withdrew her fingers. She wiped her mouth. She’d drooled a little. She felt flushed and hot.

The soldier swayed where he stood, keening quietly. After a few seconds, he said “Like there’s a whole world…” Then he collapsed slowly, by stages, starting with his knees. It was something like seeing a deck-chair folding up. He was a big man, and it took him a while to fall. 

Buffy watched. She knew that she should feel guilty about it. She’d just pulled out his sanity. She’d seen what that did to a person. He’d be left a quivering wreck. But she didn’t. He’d been a threat. More than that, he’d been in her way.

Besides, she felt much too good to feel guilty.

She looked down at herself. Her dress was torn and bloody. Her shoes were barely holding together. She couldn’t face her mom looking like this. For one thing, Joyce would totally freak out. For another, the base doubtlessly had more soldiers in it, and she didn’t really relish the idea of being shot again. Disguising herself would be a good idea.

She shot an appraising glance at the unconscious soldier. One the one hand, he wasn’t going to be needing his gear any time soon. On the other hand, he was much taller than she was, and black body armour _so_ wasn’t her style. But then again, it wasn’t like she had much choice.

From inside the compound, Buffy heard an alarm go off. It wasn’t a siren, or a klaxon, or anything that Buffy would have expected. It was a low and rhythmic pulsing, almost like a breath. It ebbed and flowed but never quite stopped.

Well, it seemed like she had a choice after all. If they knew she was coming, there was no point trying to disguise herself. Besides, there had to be someone inside who had clothes that would fit her. They couldn’t wear tactical gear all the time.

So Buffy walked over to the door. She couldn’t figure out how to open it – it didn’t have any interface that she could see – so she put her shoulder against it and _pushed_. There was a shriek of metal moving in a way that it hadn’t been designed to move, and then the door collapsed inwards with a bang.

There was no one inside. The lights flashed, on and off, on and off, and the alarm kept on going without a pause. Buffy shrugged, and walked inside. Time to go exploring.


	28. Chapter Twenty-Eight

At first, Buffy just assumed that the lights flickering on and off and on and off was part of Division Three’s alarm system. Maybe they had a dirge-like alarm that sounded vaguely like a breath, or distant thunder, and just in case someone managed to miss the incessant noise they’d added the lights as well.

But after a while, as Buffy walked and discovered no one at all, she began to wonder if it had been designed just to be annoying. There seemed to be a pattern to the flickering, an uneven pattern of on and off and on and off, but she couldn't work out what it was. She found herself waiting for the next flicker, and she could never quite seem to figure out when it should be. It was gradually turning her brain to mush. The alarm rose and fell and never entirely faded away, the lights flickered, and she found herself getting increasingly more on edge. She kept waiting for something to happen. For sudden gunfire, or traps, or _something_. She opened every door she came across, sure that there would be a trap behind it, but there was nothing at all. Every time. Nothing. 

She found Xander in a room that could only be a cafeteria. He was sprawled in a chair, feet up on the nearest table, arms crossed. He looked at her expectantly as she walked in, apparently waiting for her to say something.

She didn’t. Instead, she looked around the room. It was the first room that she’d seen that looked like it had ever had people in it. Oh, she’d seen chairs and tables before, but all the other rooms had been sterile and empty. This one had a few cups and plates left scattered across the tables, and the crowning glory was a straw boater that someone had left tucked under a chair. Buffy wasn’t sure why someone living in a military base would have a straw boater – truth be told, she wasn’t sure why _anyone_ would have a straw boater, because _hello_ ‘20s – but there it was. Obviously there’d been people here, and they’d left in a hurry.

With an expression of mild distaste, Buffy picked up one of the cups. It was still warm. They’d left recently.

“There’s a fresh pot over there.”

Buffy turned to look at Xander, who looked back at her. “What?”

“Coffee. It’s just over there. They’ve got one of those giant urn things.”

Buffy looked where he’d pointed. It was true. There was indeed a giant urn thingy. “Do you know where they went?”

“Who?” Buffy gave him a withering glance. “How would I know? I’m in your head. I know what you know.”

“Seems like everyone knows things I don’t know,” Buffy shot back.

“Welcome to the club,” Xander said cheerfully. “I’ve felt like that for years and years. I’m not so much the guy who does the knowing so much as I’m the guy who does the cleaning up after the people who do the knowing.”

“So, basically you’re saying that you don’t know where they went.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Well, helpful that’s not,” Buffy muttered. “Any chance you know where Mom is?”

Xander shrugged. “Basement would be my guess. No point kidnapping people if you aren’t going to keep them in the basement. That’s where all the best dungeons are.”

Buffy nodded. That made sense. “And do you know where _that_ is?”

“Nope.”

At that point, Buffy lost her patience. She hadn’t had a lot of it to begin with, and she was already on edge what with the lights flickering on and off and on and off and the alarm and the complete and utter lack of traps. “Well, what’s the point of you then?” She snapped.

If Xander was hurt, he didn’t show it. He shrugged expressively, and adjusted his eyepatch. “I’m here to deal with the inevitable blow out.” He stretched out his hand to her, palm up, like he was offering him something. There was, in fact, something that he was holding. “Even got my yellow crayon.”

“Uh huh.” Buffy frowned at him. “What good’s that supposed to do, exactly? Sure, I was aiming for Willow, but that didn’t quite work out.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not like Glory never tried to do the whole world ending thing either.”

“I’m not Glory.”

“You… kinda are, Buff. What with the brain suckage and stuff.”

Buffy gestured at herself. “I’m a bit too shot to be Glory. Plus I’m not with the whole ‘worship me’ thingy.”

“You’re walking around pretty well for someone who was just shot and, uh, _isn’t_ all Hell-Goddess-y then.”

“I’m covered in blood and there are holes in my dress. Plus I’m shuffling around on broken heels, so yeah, not doing the walking too well either.”

“Are you actually _bleeding_, though?” Xander asked pointedly. “Have you checked?”

“Oddly enough, looking at bullet wounds isn’t exactly my idea of a good time.”

"Has it occurred to you,” Xander said, “that the reason that you don’t know things is because you don’t _want_ to know them?”

Buffy broke the cup she was holding. She hadn’t even remembered that she was holding it, but suddenly there was a deluge of lukewarm coffee and the clatter of china splinters as they hit the floor. Buffy flexed her hand. She couldn’t help but notice that her hand wasn’t cut. “You got something you wanna say, Xan?”

“You just brain-sucked some guy and you’re standing there like it doesn’t even matter. I don’t even know what you did to Zygon the Implacable. Sure, you’re here to rescue your mom, but then you spend hours picking out dresses and shoes. I don’t even remember the last time I saw you in a dress. You did all those things – are you really gonna just stand there and tell me that you’re just Buffy, free and clear? What are you _doing_, Buff?”

“What do you _want_ from me, Xan? Sure, I’ve got powers. I’ve got some weird mutant-y thingy going on. But I can’t storm a military base. Not even if was the Slayer – still the Slayer, I mean. So, yeah, sure. Maybe I’m a little confused on the identity front, but hey, I’ve got a whole world in my head. All things dark and dead, apparently. So ex_cuse_ me if some things leak over every now and then. After all, you’re here, aren’t you? Not dead and buried or whatever.”

“Buffy,” Xander said carefully, “you just found out that you’ve got a whole world filled with dead people, including a lot of people that you, uh, _care for_, in your head. You literally live with a psychiatrist, someone who specialises in dealing with people who’ve got the major weird going on. But you didn’t tell her. You didn’t tell David. You have friends, friends who might be able to help, friends who are _alive_, but the first thing you did was get the hell out of Dodge. So I’m gonna ask you again – what’re you doing, Buffy?”

“I just want to go home,” Buffy replied. Her eyes hurt, and there was a heat and pressure behind them. She strongly suspected that she was going to cry. “This isn’t my world, Xan. I don’t belong here. I shouldn’t be here. I was the Slayer, but now I’m not. I can’t help people. I can’t save anyone. I shouldn’t be here.” She swallowed. “I couldn’t save you, Xan. I couldn’t save anyone. I ran away.”

“You’re still running, Buff,” Xander said gently, his voice warm. “You ran away, curled up inside Glory because Glory can take anything. Nothing hurts Glory. You need to stay still. You need to rest. You need to be strong.”

“How?” Buffy replied instantly, before it occurred to her that maybe she should have asked ‘why’ instead. “You said that nothing hurts Glory, but here I am, covered in my own blood. I almost died out there.” She knew, even as she spoke, that that hadn’t been what he meant. But it was all that she felt up to addressing.

Xander swung his legs off of the table and leant forward. “Bear with me here for a bit. This will seem a little off-topic.”

“Uh, okay?”

“Do you think that you – I mean, Slayer-you, not mutant-you, could take Illyria?”

Buffy frowned. That was definitely a non-sequitur. 

She’d actually thought about it. Or, more accurately, she’d thought about it when she’d been the Slayer. She’d been the Slayer – measuring yourself against everything that you came across was part of the package. You had to be the best.

It was a difficult question. Illyria didn’t spar. In later years, she barely even fought at all, preferring to stand stock still in the middle of her room for months on end. But the Old One was at least as strong as Buffy, and probably a bit faster. With the scythe, none of that would be an issue, but she didn’t think that Xander was asking about that. The thing was, Illyria’s skin was much tougher than Buffy’s, and what with not having any lungs, she didn’t need to breathe. She was literally heartless, so she couldn’t go for a blood choke or anything like that. She could just fight, without tiring, and there wouldn’t be a lot that Buffy could do to stop her.

Buffy shook her head.

“Dawn told me once that she’d asked Illyria if she could take you. You know, back when she used to give you those creepy little plans to stop demons from apocalypsing every few months. Illyria said no. The thought had never occurred to her. She knew she was the best.”

“Doing wonders for my self-esteem here, Xan.”

“Hold on, I’m getting to the pointage. The thing is, Glory was like that. She was a Goddess. She knew that she was the best, that she was literally divine. Nothing could hurt her.” He pointed at Buffy. “But _you_ aren’t her.”

“I’m getting some mixed messages. First you say I’m Glory, then you say I’m not.”

“I actually said that you’re kind of Glory,” Xander replied. “Honestly, Buff, this whole thing would be so much easier if you just listen.”

“I swear, Xan, if you don’t get to the point soon them I’m walking.” She knew that that wouldn’t actually stop Xander – he could just appear outside – but it was the principle of thing that mattered.

“See, Buffy – Buffy being you, that is-“

“-thanks, never would have worked that out-“

“- you’ve been shot before. So when someone shoots at you, you know the forms. You bleed, fall over, do the whole dying thing. Even though Glory wouldn’t. Mind over body, or something.” Xander looked up at the ceiling and he traced patterns in the air as he thought over what he’d said. After a couple of moments, he nodded. “Yeah, I think I got that right.”

Buffy looked confused. “You’re saying that I almost died because I _thought_ I should almost die?”

Xander nodded again. “More or less.”

“That’s…” Buffy paused, reached for an appropriate word, and didn’t find one. 

“Sad?”

“Sure. I’d probably go with dumb or something, but sure.” Despite herself, Buffy smiled at him. “Still, not too bad for the guy who cleans things up.”

Xander looked at her sadly. “Yeah. Right.”

“Well, I’d better get going. Got a mom to save and everything.” She turned and walked out of the room. She heard Xander sigh noisily behind her. She got the distinct impression that she’d missed something, but she couldn’t figure out what it was.

Still. It couldn’t be helped. She had a job to do.

The lights flickered above her, on and off, on and off. Almost like constant lightning strikes, she thought absently, with the alarm being each thunder clap merged together. Definitely a weird alarm system.

Then Buffy rounded a corner, and she saw a great river, stretching out in front of her. She looked behind her. It was still a hallway, complete with flickering lights. She looked back. The river was still there.

Strangely, it was bounded by walls, and there was a ceiling above it. There were even lights, which were, of course, flickering.

Before Buffy could even wonder whether she should turn back and find a different path or whether she should try to wade through it, ripples spread across the surface of the water. To her surprise, they spread up the walls as well. Seeing stone undulating like water made her feel mildly sick. 

Then, suddenly, a great copper pillar broke through the surface of the water, reaching up and up and up. Even though it towered over her, it still didn’t reach the ceiling, and the ceiling looked like it was just as high as it had always been. The perspective made Buffy’s head hurt.

Then the copper pillar shifted, and Buffy realised that it wasn’t a pillar at all. 

It was a snake. An enormous, massive snake. It arched over her, and in defiance of standard herpetological practice, it roared at her. Its voice was thunder, and its tongue was lightning.


	29. Chapter Twenty-Nine

_So it comes to pass that Buffy, the World Killed, faces the dread serpent Yurlungur with trepidation in her heart._

Buffy looked around for the source of the voice, and didn’t find it. She would have liked to have been surprised by that, but the voice had sounded almost like it had come from the depths of her own mind. It had been a deep, plummy, male voice – it sounded like the sort of voice people use in movie trailers. It had also been Australian.

The snake, Yurlungur, was still swaying above her, lightning darting around its mouth. It seemed to be waiting for her to do something. Giant snakes, movie-trailer voices with no clear source and enormous rivers that were nevertheless bounded by a narrow corridor seemed pretty dream-like to her. Maybe she’d slipped into the Astral Plane without realising it. She wondered when she’d fallen asleep.

It occurred to Buffy that she might not even be in Division Three at all. Maybe she was still outside, riddled with bullets and bleeding out. It would explain the flickering lights and the complete absence of people. She’d been in military bases before, and they generally didn’t have things like straw boaters in them. They _especially_ didn’t have humungous snakes that seemed to be made out of copper.

_The dread serpent Yurlungur hears the sound of prey approaching in the distance. It abandons Buffy, the World Killed, searching for easier game._

Sure enough, the snake had moved away, turning to face something else. Buffy squinted. The desert sun was very bright, and didn’t mesh at all with the flickering lights on the ceiling. Still, she saw a couple of figures approach the river from the other side. From this distance, she couldn’t see who they were, but she could tell that they weren’t military. One of them was wearing what looked like some kind of blue one-piece, with short sleeves and trousers that billowed out at the ankles. The figure had long dark hair, but Buffy couldn’t tell if that meant it was a girl or boy. She’d never seen anyone wear anything quite as hippy-ish, and she knew enough about military types to know that they would never dress like that. 

Well. They didn’t in the real world. Maybe they did in the Astral Plane.

The other was quite clearly female, with stringy blonde hair. She was heavily pregnant, and wearing loose brown robes that would have matched the sand if it hadn’t been for the incredibly loud pattern printed on it. The other figure was helping her down to the water.

The snake thundered at them, lightning coiling around its mouth, but they didn’t notice. Buffy thought that they were moving almost like sleepwalkers. 

Well, whoever they were, she wasn’t going to let a giant snake eat them. She was the hero, after all. Buffy, the more-or-less Slayer. The fact that she just could _not_ bring herself to care about what happened to them was beside the point. Every instinct she had told her that they were less important than she was, that they were just obstacles to her going home and so she could easily just ignore them. They might not be real, after all, whereas she most certainly was. But she couldn’t just leave them to die. That would be wrong.

She leapt, sure that she would fly through the air to land easily on the snake’s back. She remembered the sheer exhilaration as she leapt over the wall, and had no doubts that it would be as easy as that had been to grapple the snake and kill it.

She landed in the water just a few feet from where she’d stood. She flailed wildly – the current was fast, the river was deep, and she hadn’t expected to be dealing with either of those things.

_The World Killed, with water in her eyes and water in her lungs, comes to realise the difference between the other that is herself and the other that is merely other._

Buffy would have shouted that she _didn’t_, that she had no idea what the voice was even talking about, but she was having trouble keeping her head above the water. Psychiatrists had talked like that sometimes, back at Clockworks, and she hadn’t understood them then. She’d dropped out of Psych 101, or, if she was being more accurate, she hadn’t taken it at all. All she knew was that, despite a lingering feeling that her hair was going to be totally ruined by this impromptu river bath, and that rescuing two people wasn’t even slightly worth the effort, she didn’t seem to be particularly Glory-ish.

There couldn’t have been a worse time. She was going to drown. There was nothing that she could do. The current was sweeping her away, and her body was tired and fragile and all too human. She could swim, sure – she was good at swimming – but the river was much stronger than she was. 

She saw the snake lunge for the two figures on the shore. It created giant waves as it rocketed out of the water. They washed over Buffy, who was already struggling to keep afloat. The water crashed over her, and she sank. It felt like she’d been hit by a giant hammer.

She couldn’t breathe. The pressure was immense. She was being crushed. Her head was going to burst, her chest was going to implode, and there was nothing that she could do.

Buffy tried to think about Glory, tried to capture that essential Gloryness – while there might not be anything that _she_ could do, having the strength of a goddess would be just the thing. But she couldn’t think. All there was, was pressure. All she could do was drift down into the depths and wait for the moment that she broke apart.

There was something in the water. It was a deep, inky black oily substance, slipping through the water, moving against the current like a ribbon of shadow. It was coming towards her

Buffy tried to get away, tried to escape – inky shadow things were never good – but the current was driving her onwards, as implacable as a sunset.

It forced itself into her mouth, leaking down her throat and into her lungs. She could feel it curling around her organs like a parasite. She tried to keep it out, but it was stronger than her. It was inside her. 

Again.

She felt words on her tongue, felt them like they were a something solid, something tangible. They tasted like cherry.

_You should never have come_.

The words trickled out past her teeth, and then there was a noise like thunder. The river ballooned outwards, curling around her.

She was standing in a bubble of air on the riverbed, while the water flowed around her, above her. She was perfectly dry. She felt like there was a ball of ice in her chest, pushing against her lungs, against her heart. Something alien and cold.

She took a step, slow and deliberate, moving against the current. The bubble moved with her. She hadn’t planned to move her feet. The floor was river mud and linoleum at the same time, but when she took another step her foot found something solid in mid-air. She climbed an invisible staircase until she reached the surface. 

A thought appeared in her head. Never mind Glory. This is what it felt like to be a god. 

It wasn’t her thought.

The snake was frozen mid-strike. Its head was mere feet away from the two figures, neither of whom seemed to be aware of its presence. Lightning dripped from its mouth like icicles. 

“Julie Bangles!” Buffy called. It was her voice, it had come from her mouth, but her brain had nothing to do with it. There was a frigid shadow wrapped around her larynx. “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

As Buffy walked towards Yurlungur across the surface of the river, it seemed almost like the snake shrank. Almost. In actual fact, as Buffy walked, the snake didn’t get any bigger. It should have, the laws of perspective would indicate that it should – the figures on the shore certainly did – but the snake itself stayed at the same size, which meant that as Buffy got closer and closer to it, it ended up being smaller.

By the time she reached it, she towered over it as much as it had towered over her. She bent down, picked it up, and tossed it over her shoulder as though it was nothing. She felt a slight static shock as miniature lightning played over her hand, but nothing more.

She stepped ashore. As she did so, she doubled over instantly, pain clawing at her gut. Something inside her contracted, and she retched. There was a taste of bile in her mouth, and her throat felt like it had been burned with acid. She retched again, and this time water dribbled out past her lips and froze in a puddle on the ground. She heard a sound, a cold chuckle that seemed to have no source except possibly for the air itself. It faded away after a few moments.

Buffy straightened, wiping her mouth. She felt better – she didn’t feel like she was going to die for one thing, and she didn’t feel like there was a shadowy parasite curled around her organs for another.

She saw the figure in blue standing in front of her, and she felt a shock go through her. Buffy _recognised_ her – and it was a her, she could see that now. She looked different, but Buffy still recognised her.

The eyes were different, for one thing. They had been a dark brown, but now they were blue. They looked strange and out of place. Her hair was longer and straighter – it wasn’t short, messy and greasy like it had been last time Buffy had seen her. The most obvious difference, though, was that she was quite clearly whole and uninjured. She wasn’t twisted, broken and bloody.

“_Lenny_?”

“Hey there, Blondie.” Lenny waved tentatively.

Buffy opened her mouth to ask what was going on, but she shut it again. She was pretty sure that she wasn’t going to get an answer. Like most people at Clockworks, Lenny hadn’t been great at the knowing what was going on thing. Admittedly, this version of Lenny seemed infinitely more together than the Lenny that Buffy knew, but then again, that version was very dead. She looked down at the frozen puddle of water that was gently steaming under the desert sun, though, and she realised that there was nothing else that she could really say. “What’s going on?”

She shrugged. That movement was all Lenny – for the first time, Buffy thought that she might be the Lenny she knew. “How the hell should I know? Did Mommy drop you on the head when you were small? This is your head. Get a grip on it.”

“What?” Buffy blinked. “My head definitely doesn’t have lightning snakes or Australian movie trailer voice guys in it.”

“Yeah, like mine does.” Lenny rolled her eyes. “I’m dead. Why don’t you ask yourself why I’m in your head? You’re the one with all the answers.”

“Me? I’ve got none of the answers! Like, if there were answers, they’re had by people who aren’t me! Every time I think there are answers, the entire world goes totally bananas.”

“Well, boohoo. Now, my girlfriend’s just gonna have a drink before she has my child, so if you just scram…” Lenny made a vague shooing gesture at Buffy even as she turned to the pregnant woman, who was crouched awkwardly by the edge of the river and clumsily scooping water into her mouth.

Before Buffy had a chance to say anything else, Lenny and her girlfriend faded away. They gradually became transparent. Buffy reached out to grab her, but it was like trying to hold onto mist. It slipped through her fingers.

With an expression of absolute tenderness, which Buffy had never seen on her face before, Lenny reached out and stroked her girlfriend’s hair. And then they were gone.

Buffy stood staring at the spot where they’d been standing. She felt curiously empty, like there had been something inside of her that had been scooped out. Then she shuddered, momentarily cold despite the desert sun beating down on her, and she looked around.

To her surprise, she recognised the desert. She’d been here before. Most recently with Ptonomy, when they’d gone through her memories. But she remembered actually being there before, in real life – or her last life, she supposed.

The sand, the rocks, the straggly plants, she’d seen them before. As a Slayer. She’d come here for a vision quest. It was here that she’d heard, for the first time, that death was her gift.

There was an odd feeling, like a door had opened. She couldn’t say where the door was, or where it had opened from. There was a sensation of space, quite apart from the desert stretching out in front of her as far as she could see, or the walls that were a few steps away.

Then the door closed, and there was David, standing in front of her.


	30. Chapter Thirty

Buffy ran a hand through her hair, and immediately regretted it when it became tangled. Awkwardly, she managed to wrench it free. “Hi.”

“Hi,” David replied. He looked like he wasn’t quite sure how he’d gotten here and, if anything, he seemed just as confused as Buffy felt. She waited for him to say something. He didn’t.

“So, how’re you?” She couldn’t think of anything else to say, but even so, she felt ridiculous for saying something as banal as that.

“Fine, I guess.” David fidgeted absently with the hem of his shirt. “You look…”

Buffy looked down at herself. Her dress was torn and filled with bullet holes. There were streaks of not-quite-dry blood, which blended with the river mud. Her shoes, which had once been so beautiful, were barely even recognisable as shoes at all. She searched for a fitting way to describe how she looked and failed. Eventually, she settled for “Shot?”

Seemingly despite himself, the corners of David’s lips quirked up into a smile. “Almost.”

Buffy felt something welling up inside her gut. She thought it might be laughter – this whole thing _was_ totally surreal – but it might also be tears. Between the empty feeling in her core, and the taste of bile in her throat, she felt like something has curled up inside her and died.

She ignored it. She put the feeling in a box, put that box in another box, burned them, and then buried the ashes. Now wasn’t the time to be feeling things.

She looked at David. “I need to know. Is this… is this real? Are you real?”

David smiled, then, genuine and warm. Buffy remembered when they’d been driving back to Summerland, and he’d asked her almost exactly the same question. “Pretty sure, yeah. Apparently I teleport now.”

“And this – this desert? The river? You see it, right?” Buffy tried to sound like she wasn’t pleading, but she didn’t think that she was particularly successful.

“Yeah.” David looked around, a puzzled expression on his face. “What’s the deal with that, anyway?”

“Oh thank God,” Buffy breathed. A solid bar of tension that she hadn’t even realised was there dropped from her shoulders. If someone else could see it, then there was nothing wrong with _her_. She was fine – it was the rest of the world that had gone nuts. “I thought it was just me.”

David put his hands in his pockets. “I looked for you, you know. After you left.” To her surprise, there was no reproach in his words. There should have been. David had offered to help her – everyone at Summerland had – and she’d just upped and left. “I thought I found you in a clothes store of all things, but that wasn’t you.”

“How is… everyone?”

“They, uh, are pretty mad. Or Kerry is. You cracked a couple of Rudy’s ribs. Walter seems to be catatonic.”

“Oh. Sorry.” It wasn’t enough, she knew, but it was all she had. Apologies and regrets were the only things she ever had. “I wasn’t… really me.” 

It was the first time that she’d admitted to herself that all the things she’d done hadn’t been just her. Being Glory had felt… natural, in a way that Caleb hadn’t. It had been so easy. There had been nothing beyond her and what she wanted. Nothing that had been in her way had been real. Nothing that anyone else had wanted had been real. After years of memories of being the Slayer, carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, not having to carry anything other than herself had been an unbelievable relief.

“Figured.” There was no judgement in David’s voice. Buffy supposed that she shouldn’t be surprised that he, the person who hears other minds inside the privacy of his skull, understood something of what happened to her. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

“I… my powers. It seems like I can be… not just me. I can be someone who was in my world.” Seeing David’s expression, she remembered that he didn’t know about the fact that she was carrying a dead world inside of her. “I mean, the world with the demons and magic and stuff in it. When I heard that Division Three had my mom, I tried to be someone who could get her back. You know, someone who could fight an army.” She smiled sheepishly. “I ended up with Glory.”

David rocked back on his heels. As someone who had been in Clockworks with her, someone who knew the things she saw, someone who had been in group therapy with her, he knew what Glory was. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” She wondered, briefly, if she should go into detail – if she should mention the soldier whose mind she’d torn to shreds, for example – but she decided against it. She knew what she’d done, and though she could hide away and blame it on the big bad goddess, the fact of the matter was that it was her and no one else that had done it. She was going to have to live with it. She didn’t want to see the way that David looked at her to change, as it surely would, once he knew the things that she’d done. “Yeah.”

David didn’t push. Perhaps, as a telepath, he didn’t need to. Maybe he’d already trickled into her mind, as insidious as mist, and pulled every hidden thing out into the light. Or maybe not. “And the desert?” He prompted.

“Oh, yeah. No clue about that. I just walked round the corner, and there it was. There was this huge copper snake with lightning fangs or something, and an Australian movie trailer voice. Not a person, just the voice. Oh, and Lenny was here, with some pregnant girl.”

“You saw Lenny?”

Buffy was momentarily surprised that that, of all things, was the thing that David picked up on. But then she noticed the way that he eyes darted to the spot where Lenny had been, and she wondered if he’d seen her too, or if he was seeing her now. “Uh, yeah. Is that important?”

David shook his head, but everything about him told Buffy that he was lying. She couldn’t even begin to imagine why. “No, I guess not. Um, how was she?”

“Lennyish. She seemed… clean, I guess. Less wild. I’d say that she seemed older if wasn’t for the fact that, you know, she’s dead.”

David relaxed. Whatever he’d been hoping for – or, Buffy reflected, whatever he’d been dreading – her answer seemed to be enough to calm him down. “Right. Right. Good.”

Buffy looked up at him, wondering what he was hiding, and why he was hiding him. “Hey, David – do the words ‘you should never have come’ mean anything to you?”

David looked hurt. “C’mon, Buff. You look like someone murdered you, buried you, and then you clambered up out of your grave. I’d think that you’d want someone else around, now that you’re more yourself.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. The thing is, that phrase has cropped up twice now. Once in my memory, when the devil with the yellow eyes attacked me and Ptonomy, and again just now. When I was in the river, there was this… oozy shadow thing in the water. It forced its way into my mouth and I guess it probably saved my life but in, like, the ickiest way possible. But it left those words on my tongue, and they tasted of cherry.”

David made an odd flicking gesture with one hand, as though he was shooing something away, and then reached up to rub his ear as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “The devil with the yellow eyes doesn’t really speak. It’s just… there. In the shadows. Lurking.”

Buffy tilted her head. “David,” she said carefully, “is it here?”

David shook his head. “No. I haven’t seen it since we were in the cafeteria.”

Buffy mulled that over. “See, I spoke to this psychic guy who got lost on the Astral Plane. He said that my mind is kinda empty, right, and so things will come creeping inside and live there. I think that, somehow, you picked up some kind of… psychic parasite. Like one of those wormy things that live in people’s stomachs, only this thing lives in your mind. And then along comes me, with a mind like an abyss, and it jumps right in and makes a nest in the void.”

David stared at her. “What?”

Buffy blinked. “Oh, basically I think we need to find someone to go all pest control on our brains.”

David just continued staring at her, focusing on her lips. “I can’t hear you!” His voice was loud, just a short step away from a shout.

Buffy was surprised. There was a river rushing behind her, and the odd, breath-like alarm was still going, but they’d been having a perfectly normal conversation without having to shout. Then she saw the way that David’s eyes kept flashing to the point where Lenny had been standing, and she remembered the odd flicking movement he’d made – hehad been shooing someone. “Is Lenny here right now?” She shouted.

“I can’t hear you!” David shouted back. “Lenny’s here!”

Buffy turned to face what was, to her, nothing but empty space. “Hey, Lenny? Can you do me a favour and shut up? You’re really not helping here.”

As if in response, a large boulder shifted aside. There was a squeaking sound as it moved, as though it was on badly oiled wheels. From the spot where the stone had been, two trees began to grow. They weren’t healthy trees – their bark was dry and peeling, and such leaves as they had were brown, twisted and desiccated. If a desert had trees, rather than straggly shrubs, they would look like these. They grew quickly, breaking through the ceiling and vanishing from sight. At the same time, they reached up towards the searing desert sun. They coiled around each other, their branches intertwining.

“Did you see that?” Buffy said. When David didn’t respond, she shouted “I said, did you-“

“I heard you,” David said mildly, looking up at the trees. He squinted. “How can we be seeing them and not seeing them at the same time?”

Buffy shrugged. “Astral Plane shenanigans. It’s all of the wigginess.”

“Right.” David seemed disconcerted. “Does it look like a ladder to you?”

It did, now that Buffy thought about it. The way that the trees leant against each other, with their branches twisted together, did look like a ladder. “I guess it does. Do you think we should go up?”

David shook his head.

Buffy shot him a wry look. “Fair enough. Got any…” she trailed off, as she noticed that someone was coming down the tree-ladder.

He was dressed in dusty, paint-spattered black overalls. He looked like a janitor of some kind, or a handyman. He had a cap wedged tightly on his head. When he turned around to face the pair, Buffy noticed that he had the darkest skin of anyone that she had ever seen. It was almost like ink. He waved, and Buffy instinctively looked behind her. He hadn’t seemed to be looking at her, or at David – rather, it had seemed as though he had been looking at some point behind her. But there was nothing there. Nothing but parched desert, as far as the eye could see, or the perfectly ordinary wall a few feet behind her. She wasn’t sure what he could have been looking at, so she turned to face him again.

“Hey there!” He said pleasantly. His voice was deep, rich, and strongly Australian. Buffy instantly recognised it as the movie trailer voice she’d heard earlier. “How’s it hangin’?”

Buffy frowned. “How’s what hanging?”

“I think he’s asking us how we are,” David supplied. The man tapped the side of his nose and pointed at David.

“Why didn’t you just say that then?”

“I did.”

Buffy blinked. “Oh. Right. Guess I was just thrown by the tree ladder.”

“No wuckers.”

“You what now?”

An expression crossed the man’s face, as though he was actively changing gears in order to communicate with them. Buffy knew it well – she’d worn it often enough, talking to Giles. “No worries.”

“Well, as much as I’d like to not be with the worrying, we’re currently in the world’s only indoor desert, and I’m guessing that you had a little something to do with that.” Buffy shot the man a pointed look. “You’re a mutant, aren’t you?”

The man shrugged. “I s’pose you might call me that. I prefer storyteller, personally. Mutant makes it seem like something’s buggered up, and that there is not.”

“Cool, yeah,” Buffy said impatiently, “only the thing that I was getting at is that this is your desert, isn’t it? You did something mutant-y, and now here we are, all mutanted.”

“Do you have a name?” David said suddenly.

The man nodded, and pointed to his chest. There were two labels, barely visible under the smears of paint. One said ‘Ipsum’, the other ‘Curate’. “They call me Ipsum when they come to call.” He smiled. “Don’t need to ask who _you_ are. Written above you in letters of crimson fire, it is. The World Killer and the World Killed. Quite the pair.”

Buffy fought down the urge to look up. Even here, in this place, she knew that there weren’t giant flaming letters floating above her head. At least, she almost wished that she knew that for certain. “Right. So you know what we are, and you still decided you’d stick us in a desert and attack us with a snake.”

“Oh, no.” Ipsum waved his hands. “No, you’ve got it all backwards! You attacked Yurlungur. He was just there, biding his story, ready to eat them as would raise a new tribe. That’s what he does.”

“Okaaay,” Buffy said slowly, “but it wouldn’t have been here to do that if you hadn’t made him be here.” 

Ipsum nodded. “That’s a fair shout.”

“So basically you did make him do the whole – you know what? I really don’t care. I’m just here to find my mom, so if you could, like, not with the mystical mumbo jumbo, that would be great.”

“Not gonna stop a while? Take a load off, see the gallery?”

“Gonna have to be a no on that one.”

To her surprise, Ipsum just shrugged, as though it was no concern of his. Buffy couldn’t tell whether he genuinely didn’t care, but either way it wasn’t something that she would expect for someone in Division Three. “Well, you’d best take your swords before you scarper.”

Buffy reared back in surprise. "Okay, I just _know_ I heard that wrong."

Without a word, Ipsum moved over the stone that had slid aside so that the tree-ladder could grow. He flipped it over. To Buffy’s amusement, there really were wheels on the bottom. There were also the handles of four swords. Buffy couldn’t work out how the stone had wheeled aside in the first place – the handles were higher than the wheels – but then she supposed that everything was weird enough that she shouldn’t even bother to question it. “You’re just going to offer us swords? Doesn’t seem like a very Division Three thing to do.”

Ipsum shrugged again. “It’s just the next thing in the story. They’re just the things that you need to see.”

Buffy opened her mouth to ask why, but then realised that she had absolutely zero interest in the answer, so she shut it again.

“I’d like to see the gallery,” David said. Buffy shot him a glare. He looked at her blankly.

“David-“ Buffy began hotly, but then she saw Drusilla standing behind him. She waved cheerily, and adjusted her comically huge sunhat. In that moment, Buffy remembered the tarot cards that Drusilla had mentioned – one of them being the four of swords.

She turned back to Ipsum. He wasn’t looking at her. He was, quite clearly, looking at Drusilla. She sighed. “Fine.”


	31. Chapter Thirty-One

Ipsum gestured grandly. “Welcome to my gallery.”

Buffy looked around. For a room that could only be reached by a tree-ladder that had grown out from under a rock on wheels, it was pretty ordinary. She was surprised. She had expected something… well, unexpected. She supposed that having a completely ordinary room was therefore _not_ expected, which made it unexpected, but that just made her head hurt.

The lights were low, but they were steady and didn’t flicker. There was no sound of the constant alarm that had been sounding ever since she’d entered the base, either. It gave her a momentary sense of vertigo – she’d been so used to them that it seemed as though the air had suddenly thinned out. There was a ringing in her ears, and breathing suddenly seemed more difficult than it had any right to be. She’d been syncing her breath to the alarm. If David was similarly affected, though, she couldn’t tell.

There were pieces of art liberally dotting the room. While a few were hanging on walls, most of them seemed to have been sewn into free-standing metal frames. They were all fairly simple, done with a small brush in four colours, red, yellow, black, and white. They’d been painted on something that seemed to have the same colour and texture as bark. They wouldn’t have looked out of place in her mom’s gallery in Sunnydale. In fact, Buffy was reasonably sure that Joyce had had Aboriginal art that looked almost exactly like this. 

There were some simplistic pieces, depicting abstract patterns of interlocking lines and grids, but then there were the other pieces. The first one that caught her attention was an image of an outstretched hand – it was white against a light brown background and would have been practically impossible to see, if it hadn’t been for the black streaks on it that looked like ash. On the palm rested the world. 

Buffy had seen the image before. Walter had been carving it. 

There were others she recognised too, she realised. Another hand, waving as it reached out of the dirt. A serpent with stylised lightning curling around its mouth. David, eyes glittering yellow in the reflected glow of the lightning bolt in his hand. Each of them was simple – there was no attempt at depth or proper perspective. Nevertheless, it seemed as though each image had captured the essence of the scene. It might not have the details, but it had the soul.

Then there was the image of the devil with the yellow eyes. It was just a few lines, and yet the eyes seemed to hover in the air, quite apart from the bark that it was painted on. It managed to capture the sheer _alieness_ of the thing. This was something that should not exist, and the fact that it was here was a perversion of the natural order. The bark couldn’t fully contain it, the paint couldn't fully depict it – but even so, it seemed like it was one short step away from emerging from the painting.

Buffy looked away. Though her eyes skated across other paintings, she didn’t really see any of them. The painting was almost magnetic. Unwillingly, her gaze kept being drawn back to it. In an attempt to ignore it, she focused on Ipsum. He was examining her closely.

“Who _are_ you?” Buffy said. Her voice was harsher than she would have liked, and she sounded out of breath, but it was an important question. “These things – these are things that happened. Things that exist. Things from my – our lives. But here they are.” She was rambling, she knew. She felt like she was trying to build a bridge out of her words, trying to span the abyss that the image of the devil with yellow eyes had suddenly opened in front of her.

David flinched at the sound of her voice, and his gaze snapped to Ipsum. He, too, had been staring at the painting. His face was pale and drawn.

Ipsum shrugged easily. “I’m the curate of the gallery,” he replied, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Buffy shook her head. “No no. That’s not an answer. That’s what you _do_. But that doesn’t explain how, or who, or what. That’s like you asking me who I am and I say, um, a mental patient.” David winced next to her. It wasn’t long ago that they had thought that they were nuts, rather than the world. “Or, like-“

“A Slayer?” Ipsum interjected. “That’s what you’d say, isn’t it? Class Protector? Defender of the small?”

Buffy blinked, thrown. She would have liked to say no, but even now, after years of therapy, she’d answer if someone called out ‘Slayer’. It was the core of who she was. Of what she was. “Right, okay, bad example, but-“

“Where are you?” David interrupted, brow furrowed. “I’m trying to read your mind, but it’s like it’s not really here – like there’s something in the way, or, ah – what are you doing?”

Ipsum looked at David. An expression flickered across his face, too fast for Buffy to see. It might have been pity, or sadness, or scorn. Then it was gone. “Take a seat.” He pointed at a trio of tree stumps in the middle of the gallery. They hadn’t been there a moment ago, but now they had never been anywhere else. They were black, incredibly finely grained, and seemed to glisten slightly in the light.

Buffy touched one. Though it was dry, it felt slightly oily. For a moment, she thought about refusing, but then she remembered that she looked like a bloody corpse that had been regurgitated by a river. She didn’t need to be picky. She sat.

“Has it occurred to you two,” Ipsum said genially, “that you’re both drongos?”

“Those drum things?” Buffy said. She looked over at David, but he seemed as confused as she did. “Um, I think I can definitely give a big no on that one. Totally never thought I was a drum.”

“A fool. Idiot. Moron. Someone more’n a few brain cells away from smart,” Ipsum said. Though his words were harsh, the fact that he seemed to be barely containing laughter deprived them of a great deal of their sting. “You’re thinking of bongos.”

Buffy automatically opened her mouth to protest – she wasn’t nearly as blonde as she looked, and not least because her hair was matted with mud – but she closed it again. She sighed. “Is this the part where you say that all of this would be a lot easier if I just paid more attention? ‘Cause I’ve heard that one before.”

“Neither of you are asking the right questions.”

“What questions are they?” David said. “And don’t say that was the right question, because that wouldn’t even make sense.”

Ipsum leant forward, eyes bright. “Why do you see Lenny?”

Buffy frowned. “You know, that totally wasn’t what I thought you were going to say. I thought there’d be some whole profound but also kinda meaningless thingy.”

Ipsum ignored her. “You, Buffy. You’ve got a dead world inside your head, but Lenny isn’t from there. In Caleb’s church, you saw everyone you’ve ever cared about, all of them dead – even the people who are still alive here, in this world. But you also saw Lenny. Lenny dug you out from under Clockworks.” He turned to face David. “And you – you’re psychic. You reach out like mist and cling to other minds. You’ve been told that you aren’t sick, that the things you see are just things floating up from the subconscious.” Ipsum shrugged. “Yours, hers, everyone’s, doesn’t matter. But you see Lenny, too. You flex your muscles and there she is – but she’s dead, and the dead don’t have minds. So what have you been seeing?”

Buffy knew that she should be thinking about what Ipsum had said. He definitely had a point – everyone that she saw was from her world, apart from Lenny. But instead, all she could do was wonder how he knew all of that. “Who are you? No one knows those things. _David_ doesn’t know about all those things, and he’s, like, Mister Magic Mind Reader Man. So how do _you_ know about them?”

“I’m you,” said the man in dusty, paint-spattered overalls. “I’m me. I’m everything you need to see.”

“Walked right into that one,” Buffy murmured. “Okay, so leaving aside the totally cryptic crypticness that is you – what are you actually saying?”

“Of course!” David said, as though Ipsum had said something that had actually made sense. “That’s why I can’t find your mind.”

“David? Wanna share with the class?”

“I can’t read his mind because I keep getting in the way. It’s like trying to see the back of my head, or trying to take a picture of a camera with the camera. It’s not that he isn’t here, exactly, but more like he’s behind me. Or inside, or… yeah.”

Buffy looked at him. He shrugged helplessly. “Once more with sense?”

“I’m a projection from your minds,” Ipsum explained. “You needed to hear some things, and here I am, ready to tell you things.”

Buffy stared at him. She’d never seen him before. She’d never been to Australia, never even been close. She strongly doubted that David had either. “Why you?” She knew, even as she said it, that what she really wanted to do was doubt him, but this place was _weird_. Having some psychic projection thingy going on was practically normal in comparison to some to the other things that had happened to her. After all, if there was a demon here, in this place, then it was one that you brought in with you – why not an Australian gallery curate?

“Dunno.”

“Why am I not surprised by that?”

“Is there anything that you’d be surprised by, at this point?”

Buffy mulled that over. “Fair enough. So what were you saying about Lenny?”

Ipsum grinned. It was not something that had any mirth or humour in it. It had the form of a smile, but none of the spirit. “You’ve got a whole world in your head. All things dark and dead.”

Buffy began to ask him what he was talking about, but then she suddenly understood. “Oh.”

Ipsum nodded. “Now you get it.”

“I’ve got dead people in my head,” Buffy said slowly, “and, being a mutant, someone born on this world in this life with these genes, I can’t tell what happened here and what happened there. Therapy didn’t help, drugs didn’t help. I can’t tell the difference. So when Lenny died, she just slipped right in. Easily as a, a corpse into an open grave.” She looked up at Ipsum. “Chrissy too, yeah? And the rest of the Division Three soldiers? She wasn’t the First. I’ve got a bigot with a cut throat in my head.”

“Sometimes she was the First,” Ipsum said, “but sometimes she wasn’t.”

David looked like he didn’t know what was going on, which made sense, given that he didn’t know anything about the world in Buffy’s head. “And me? Why do I see Lenny?”

“Who else would you see? She’s as familiar to you as your own brain. More’n that. She’s a damn sight more real to you than Syd or Melanie or Kerry. She’s as near to being you as anyone can be.”

“Then why don’t you look like her? You’re just… some guy. Buffy doesn’t know who you are. We both saw Lenny outside, but you aren’t her.”

While David was talking, Buffy found her gaze drawn inexorably back to the painting of the devil with the yellow eyes. As she did so, she noticed a painting next to it, one that she’d missed before. It was small, smaller than a postcard, and it showed an image of a woman wearing an absurdly large sunhat, hiding away from the desert sun. It was a simple sketch, but Buffy recognised Drusilla when she saw her. She’d been there, down in the desert. She’d smiled, and waved, and she was the reason that she’d climbed the ladder. But she wasn’t here now. She was nowhere to be seen.

She looked at the paintings. Four colours. Red, yellow, black, and white.

She remembered a sign, red letters across a yellow background. _YOU SHOULD NEVER HAVE COME._

She looked back at Ipsum, talking earnestly to David. She spoke. Although she hadn’t intended to speak, hadn’t even thought of doing so, she knew that she was right as soon as the word tumbled out past her lips.

“_Liar_.”


	32. Chapter Thirty-Two

David and Ipsum had been talking about something, but they stopped when Buffy spoke. David looked confused, which wasn’t all that surprising given the circumstances. He didn’t look actively doubtful, though. Buffy was grateful for that. Ipsum, on the other hand, had no expression whatsoever.

“Come again?” Ipsum said, his tone surprisingly mild for someone accused of lying. “Didn’t hear you right.”

Buffy gestured at the paintings. “I was just looking at these things you’ve… painted. They’re good. Lifelike, but totally not. I was just wondering about the, uh, limited colour palette. All you’ve got is red, yellow, black, and white. Nothing else. No blue, or-“

Ipsum cut her off with a derisive snort. “Blue’s not a real colour. They say the sky’s blue, but it ain’t. They say the sea’s blue, but it ain’t.” He pointed at David, who blinked in surprise. “They say his eyes are blue, but they ain’t either. Nothing’s ever blue. Blue’s the colour of absence. Of things that have no other colour to be.”

“Sure,” Buffy said, “whatever. Only the thing is, with colours like that, all you’re ever going to get is part of the picture.”

Ipsum scratched his head. “Not exactly going for photorealism, here.”

“Yeah, I got that.” Buffy took a breath. “That’s why I called you a liar. Or part of the reason, I guess.”

“Didn’t take you for a radical art critic.” Ipsum’s smile was easy and smooth. He didn’t seemed bothered by what Buffy was saying.

“Oh, you aren’t lying about the art.” Buffy paused. “Or maybe you are. S’pose you’re lying _with_ the art. ‘Cause , the thing is, you’re only telling us part of the truth. Only showing part of the world in your paintings.”

Ipsum looked at David, apparently to see if he understood what Buffy was saying. Seeing that he didn’t, he turned back to Buffy. “You’re gonna have to explain your reasoning there.”

“You said that I see Lenny because she’s dead and, in all my mutant-y goodness, I scooped her up and bundled her together with the world in my head. Sure. I buy that. But you said that David sees Lenny because there’s no one else that he’d see, and that set off some alarm bells.”

“Why?” David said. He sounded quizzical, uncertain, but still not doubtful. “I see – used to see much weirder things than her. I’ve known Lenny practically my whole life. Seeing her makes sense.”

“Sure it does,” Buffy agreed. “That’s why he’s been appearing as her.” She nodded at Ipsum.

“What?” Ipsum and David said in unison.

“See, I might be a dingo-“

“-drongo-“

“-one of those things,” Buffy continued without a hitch, “but sometimes I pay attention. Back at Summerland, David, when you offered to help with the head rummaging and stuff, you said ‘you haven’t seen our muscle yet’. _Our_ muscle. I thought that was a bit wiggy, but what with the major freakage over having the devil with yellow eyes in my head, as well as feeling like Rudy had broken my tailbone, I didn’t really think about it. You said a load of things that I didn’t get. That just seemed like one more. But then _you_,” she turned to Ipsum, who raised an eyebrow, “said something about David flexing his muscles and then Lenny shows up. But I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it wasn’t like that. I’m gonna guess that David feeling like all the things in his head got shifted around happened _after_ Lenny showed up. I’m gonna say that it was Lenny that moved them. Or something wearing Lenny’s face.”

“You mean me,” Ipsum said. It wasn’t a question.

Buffy shrugged. “If the boot fits.”

“But it doesn’t. I’m something you conjured up, that both of you conjured up. Some subconscious manifestion. The little other. I’m here, in this place, because you brought me here. Same as your demons, same as-“

“Yeah, yeah, you said that, but I don’t buy it. See, I saw Drusilla, down there in the desert. Just for a moment. The reason I came up, the _only_ reason, is because you’ve got four swords stuck in a stone and she told me about a tarot card with them on it. But she isn’t here. The thing that _is_ here, though, is that painting of her, over there. The one where she’s in the desert, same as I saw her. I’m thinking you plucked that little event out of my head and thought ‘hey, I can use that’. And here we are.”

“What makes you think that I have that kind of power? I’m just a storyteller.”

“That’s what you’ve been doing. Telling stories.” Buffy paused. “When I was young, my sister had this phase of making these awful, awful meals. Like, impossibly bad food. But Mom and Dad used to smile and eat it and try not to puke because she was young and, besides, they were splitting up and they didn’t want her to feel bad. But Dawnie just kept _on_ doing it, and eventually Mom literally got sick of it and told her to stop. Dawn sulked for _weeks_.”

“Is there a point to this?”

“I’m getting there, I’m getting there. Anyway, Dawn used to lash out. Steal little things, skip her school work – never really understood why that was lashing out, but she did it – and she also used to leave the stove on, and say that Mom was doing it, that every time she cooked she was leaving the gas on. Eventually Mom figured out what she was doing and really chewed her out. She came up with a name for it. You know, for making her think that she was doing something that she wasn’t. Called it gaslighting.”

“That’s literally what it’s called, Buff,” David said with a sheepish smile. “It’s a thing, and that’s what it’s called.”

“Really? Huh. Didn’t know that. Anyway, that’s what you’ve been doing to me. To David. That creepy snowman, that was you. Division Three and the blinking lights and the breath alarm and the straw boater, that was you. You made me think I was losing it. I don’t know what you did to David, but that thing you said about Lenny, that was part of it. I bet that the things he sees, the things that made him think that he was sick, that was you. And then you made him think that he _isn’t_ sick, that he’s better _now_, that he’s healthy and powerful and all of that _now_, but really it’s just you spinning stories, so we don’t know what’s going on. And then here you are, with these things that you call answers, and we come to you like flies to a spider. You’re the wormy thing in our minds. That painting over there? The one of the devil with the yellow eyes?” Buffy swallowed, took a deep breath. It was surprisingly difficult. Her lungs felt tight. “It’s a self-portrait, isn’t it? That’s _you_.” 

Ipsum turned to David. He made a gesture that wasn’t a _quite_ a dismissal. The look on his face wasn’t one of scorn – he wasn’t going as far as to suggest that Buffy was stupid, a figure of derision. Not quite. His expression was one of astonishment, and it said quite clearly ‘_Can you believe this?_’

Apparently, though, David could. “I thought I couldn’t read your mind because it was _my_ mind, because you were something that was me. But if I can’t read your mind because it's _inside_ me, because you're wearing my mind like a shield…”

“I tried to tell you,” Buffy said. “In the desert. I tried to tell you about the parasite in our minds. But you couldn’t hear me because Lenny was yell- because _he_ was yelling at you.”

For a moment, Ipsum looked like he still didn’t believe a word they were saying. He looked as though they’d gone mad, like they were spouting nonsense and he alone was still sane and rational. But then he smiled, thin and cold. “Even if this were true – if I was this thing, this parasite, that you think I am – what would happen then?”

It wasn’t the question that Buffy had been dreading. She’d been dreading two things – the first and most obvious being that he’d simply turn into the horrifying thing that was the devil with yellow eyes, and then do something horrifying to them. Most likely involving zombies and/or shadowy, inky things that forced their way down throats.

The second was at once less obvious and less threatening, but it was also the option that Buffy had dreaded the most. She’d dreaded Ipsum simply laughing and shrugging it off, pointing out something that she hadn’t seen, hadn’t even _thought_ about. She dreaded being wrong, because if she was wrong then the world made much less sense than she thought it did. Parts of her mind – not people, not _ghosts_ – could just pop up in the form of an Australian curate. If she was wrong, it didn’t just mean that she was wrong. It meant that there was something wrong with _her_. In short, the thing that she dreaded the most was gaslighting.

She hadn’t expected him to practically come out and admit it, and so she didn’t have an answer to his question.

Thankfully, David did. “We kill you.”

Ipsum rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes of course. How silly of me.” He focused on Buffy. “And you? What do you do?”

“Me?” Buffy said in surprise. 

“You. The runaway. The girl who refuses to know the things that are right in front of her. The girl who hides herself away so that nothing can hurt her. So that there isn’t anything of her there to hurt. What do _you_ do?”

The answer, the same answer that David gave, was on her tongue before she even had time to think about it. But it didn’t get further than that. It sounded stark, ugly and, more than anything, it sounded untrue. She wasn’t a killer. Sure, she was the Slayer, and that was practically the same thing, and sure, she _had_ killed people. But she wasn’t a killer. To sit opposite someone and tell them to their face that she was going to kill them – that wasn’t her. It might have been, in another life, on another world. But not here. Not now. She might have brought a lot of demons with her, but that wasn’t one of them.

“We stop you.” Her reply was too late, and it sounded weak, even to her.

Ipsum sat back, and smiled, satisfied. “You might want to get your stories straight.”

There was a vibration, although Buffy couldn’t have said what it was that vibrated. Whatever it was, it shook the room. Paintings trembled in their frames. Buffy felt like her teeth were rattling inside her skull, as though she was a short step from being shaken to pieces. David sat, jaw clenched, fists clenched, concentrating.

Ipsum reached out and cuffed the back of his head. Not hard. There was no real force behind it. It was more like someone telling off a naughty puppy than anything else. The room stopped shaking, and David stared at him, eyes wide, shocked. “Stop that, kiddo. You’ll pull something.” He took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. “Well, I guess I’d best toddle off.”

He stood. David moved to grab him, but Ipsum somehow managed not to be where David’s hands were. Buffy wasn’t sure how he did it – he didn’t seem to move. It reminded her of Cary and Kerry, only in reverse. Ipsum just wasn’t where David was, even if she couldn’t work out how that was possible. “I’ll leave you with a couple of things,” Ipsum said nonchalantly. “David, you’d best hurry. It’s getting dark.” He looked at Buffy, his dark eyes intent. “And you. World Killed. Put the pieces together. The answer to the question that you aren’t asking is sitting right in front of you.”

Then he turned and walked into one of the blank sheets of bark that were dotted around room. It didn’t tear, or move at all. He left behind an inky image of a black figure, in black, paint-spattered overalls.

There was silence for a long moment, and then David said “What was that?”

Before Buffy could even think about answering – before she could think about anything at all – everything went black. She felt like someone had drilled into her and replaced mot of her bones with molten lead. She couldn’t see, and her hands refused to move. Her back ached, cold seeping through from the stone wall she was leaning against. It formed a counterpoint to the hot, sticky stuff that was covering her dress. She tried to breathe, but her lungs were full of blood and bullets.


	33. Chapter Thirty-Three

Buffy remembered dying. She remembered it so intensely that there had been nights (many, many nights) when she’d woken with the absolute certainty that she was drowning, or falling, or bleeding. She remembered dying. She remembered what happened after, too. At least the way that it felt.

But she didn’t remember the actual _act_ of dying. There hadn’t been a light, or anything. One moment, she’d been a broken body. The next she’d been, physically, nothing at all.

Nevertheless, she had no doubts that she was dying now. She was no longer struggling to breathe. Her body had given that up as a lost cause. She supposed that she should fight, but the flesh that she’d been wrapped in felt so far away. The bile and the blood and the warmth of the sun seemed to be so far away. All of it was happening to someone else.

Buffy hadn’t ever felt all that attached to her body. She wasn’t particularly bothered by it, not like some of the people at Clockworks – she remembered a story about a man who had become so convinced that his leg didn’t belong to him that he’d cut it off. Even so, it was difficult to believe that it was really hers. She had memories of someone who was infinitely more physical than she could ever be, and her body felt more like the Slayer’s than it did hers.

And now it was dying. Everything was dark, and there was no breath in her lungs. There was only a handful of flickering neurons left. Soon, she would be as dead as her world. 

There was sound. Voices. She couldn’t quite hear what they were saying past the overwhelming silence of her lack of breath, but she recognised panic when she heard it. There were two, three, four. More than she could easily count, which was a lot more than she could bring herself to care about. Let them worry about her bullet-ridden body. She didn’t have the energy. She was _tired_. Now it was time to rest.

There were shouts, gunfire, thuds. They were muffled now, heard through blood and eardrums that belonged to her body, but not to her. Someone grabbed her. Her body might have screamed, or there might merely have been blood burbling away in her throat.

The last thing she heard was a voice. It came from out of the darkness behind her eyes. “Death is your gift,” it said.

Then she heard nothing at all. There was no one there to hear anything. Just a corpse.

~*~

Buffy knew she was in a hospital bed before she even opened her eyes. There was something unique about them that was instantly recognisable, at least if you spent as much time in them as she had. It was comfortable enough for her to sleep on, but not so comfortable that she’d want it to stay in it too long.

She felt beaten, battered and, more than anything, bemused. She didn’t understand how she was here to be feeling anything at all. She should be dead. She’d been shot. Repeatedly. She might be a mutant, but that didn’t mean that she could survive a hail of gunfire. She _remembered_ dying. Remembered bleeding out, blood in her lungs, sunlight on her skin. She remembered it getting dark, becoming dusk without anything like a sunset.

She opened her eyes. Deep in her bruised bones, she dreaded what she might see. A desert sky superimposed over the ceiling. Or people in tactical gear with guns. Or, worst of all, doctors swarming around her, ready to tell her that none of this had really happened. At least, not outside of her head.

She was in an infirmary. There were a few beds like the one she was lying in, but they were empty. There were no doctors, no people with guns, no desert sky. There was just Ptonomy, sitting beside her.

When he saw her eyes open, his lips stretched into something which might have been called a smile if it weren’t so tired. “So, how are you?”

Buffy smiled despite herself, though she suspected that it was every bit as lacklustre as Ptonomy’s. “That’s a pointed question.”

“Is it? You’re the one in a hospital bed.” 

Buffy shifted uncertainly, and then flinched as the movement sent flashes of pain screaming through her. “I don’t really know what happened.” She looked at Ptonomy. “Shouldn’t you be, uh, unconscious? Shouldn’t I be...” she trailed off, unwilling to say the word ‘dead’.

“Let me tell you what I know.” Ptonomy took a deep breath, held it, exhaled slowly. Whatever he was going to say, Buffy guessed, it wasn’t something that she wanted to think about. “You used your gift. You became someone else. Something else. You went looking for your mom.”

Buffy nodded, the movement setting off fireworks inside her skull. “I know that part. But what happened after-“

“This is difficult,” Ptonomy interrupted. “I’m… not sure what happened. What’s happening. Give me a second to run through things."

Buffy opened her mouth to say something flippant, but she closed it again. Ptonomy remembered everything, all the time. Whatever happened, he could be _certain_ that it had. She couldn’t imagine what had happened that could take it away from him. Judging by the tension that he was trying to hide, it wasn’t something good.

“David looked for you with his mind. He knows you. He’s heard your mind before, and he thought that he could find it again. Cary looked for you too, in his own way. I woke up. David thought he found you out shopping, but that was someone else.”

“Nope. Still me. Wasn’t, uh, in my right mind.”

Ptonomy nodded once, sharply. “He kept looking for you. Then, suddenly, he collapsed. Syd screamed, reached out to grab him, but she can’t touch.” He grimaced. “None of us could. There was something keeping us away.”

“Hands?” Buffy thought about the hands that had stopped people from pulling her and Ptonomy out of her memory.

Ptonomy shook his head. “Something shadowy.”

“Right.” That was what the shadows had looked like to everyone except David. 

“He lay there, motionless, barely breathing, for about twenty minutes. Then he sat up, eyes wild, and vanished. Almost before we had time to even think about looking for him, he was back. He was carrying you.”

Buffy frowned. She remembered something about being grabbed, lifted, but that had seemed like someone else. It felt more like a dream than anything else. “Me?”

“You were dead.” The words weren’t unexpected, but the force of them still hid Buffy like a fist. “Bullets in your lungs, stomach, throat-“

“Can you not?” She rasped.

“Sorry,” Ptonomy apologised. “Force of habit. I list when I’m worried.”

“Sure, yeah, but if you could not with the listing of where I was shot…”

“Right. Sorry.”

Buffy swallowed. “I realise that I may not like the answer to this, but why aren’t I dead? I’ve been shot before, and I only pulled through because someone dumped a ton of black magic mojo into me. I don’t think Merlin showed up and threw spells around.” She paused as she remembered the events of the last few days. “I mean, I assume he didn’t.”

“David told us to save you. We have doctors here – you aren’t the first person to get to us with bullets in you. We told him that you were dead, that there was nothing we could do, but he said that it wasn’t dark yet. There was still time. So the doctors went to work. They didn’t have much hope – there’s a lot of things that you can do if you have power like David, but bringing back the dead isn’t one of them. We’ve seen people in denial here, too.”

That was the first thing that Ptonomy had said that she didn’t agree with. She’d died before. All it took was the right words at the right time, the right _action_. If you have the power to kill the world, then you have the power to save it too. It had to go both ways. She’d seen enough Slayers leaning towards the dark to know that. But she didn’t say anything. 

“While they were operating, the lights began to flicker. Power surge, they thought. Side effect of having a powerful psychic under a lot of stress. But then your brain became active. Neurons began to fire. They shouldn’t have. It should have been d-“

“Don’t.”

“Right. Anyway. Then there was a sound. Like a breath. Or thunder. Something that ebbed and flowed but never quite stopped.”

“I began to breathe.”

Ptonomy nodded.

She remembered the lights in Division Three, and the alarm. She’d thought it had been designed to drive her crazy, that it was some kind of esoteric trap set up by people who knew a lot more about hunting mutants than she did. But it hadn’t been. It had been her. The lights that had been flickering had been her brain. The alarm had been her breath.

And both of them had stopped when she’d climbed the tree-ladder into Ipsum’s gallery. When she’d died. David hadn’t teleported. At least, not then. He’d just dived into an empty mind.

“While the doctors operated, once it became clear that you were getting better, David told us what happened. He told us about Ipsum, the parasite.” Ptonomy smiled. “Cary said he had quite the sense of humour.”

Buffy frowned. She couldn’t remember Ipsum saying anything actually funny. “Did he? How?”

“There’s a phrase in Latin. _Cura te ipsum_. It means ‘heal thyself’. He called himself Ipsum, the curate.”

“I don’t think making bad puns in Latin counts as having a sense of humour,” Buffy said. “Anyway, why would he call himself something like that? He’s a parasite in my head. David’s head. Whichever. Definitely not the kind of thing that’s doing healing of any kind.”

Ptonomy shrugged. “Way I heard it, he said some things that lead to some breakthroughs. In any case, there’s no reason that a monster nestled in your brain that twists reality for kicks _should_ make sense.”

“Sure, I guess,” Buffy said doubtfully. She suddenly remembered the ice that had healed Ptonomy. That hadn’t been her, hadn’t been David, hadn’t been Oliver. There was only one other option. She just didn’t know why. She shook her head to clear it, and instantly regretted the motion. “But that’s not all that happened. Something’s got you wigging out. While a mind parasite is definitely the major creepage, I don’t think that it’s the thing that’s got you going. So spill. Something else happened, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” Ptonomy replied. “I did say. It twists reality just for kicks. That’s what it’s been doing.”

“Like what?” Buffy asked, then immediately wished she hadn’t. There was only so many evil snowmen and giant lightning snakes that she could take.

Ptonomy was about to reply, but then he checked his watch. “It would be easier if I show you. I’ll be back in a moment.”

Before Buffy had a chance to tell him that she didn’t really want to see whatever it was, he left the room. He came back a moment later, carrying a large pot with a palm tree in it. He put it down on a chair. “Watch.”

Buffy, against her better judgement, watched. She watched for ten seconds, twenty, thirty. “It’s a palm tree. Is there something I’m missing?”

“Give it a second.”

She did. Then she have it an extra five. Nothing continued to happen. She was about to say something when the leaves of the tree began to shake as though there was a strong breeze. There wasn’t. The leaves shivered and quivered, and then, so slowly that Buffy wasn’t really sure they were doing it all, they began to merge together. Their colour began to change. The green leeched away, becoming a pale, fleshy pink. 

Buffy felt sick. The leaves weren’t leaves anymore. They were fingers, clawing the air, reaching out to hold and to grasp.

“It’s a palm tree,” Ptonomy said grimly. “Every day at two minutes past eight, it does this.”

“Take it away.”

Ptonomy, unwilling to try and pick up the pot now that the fingers were there and ready to grab him, wheeled the chair out into the corridor. “Lots of things like that have been happening. A maze grew up in Melanie’s therapy room, and David got lost in it. Everything that’s blue has lost all substance.” He shuddered. “I really recommend that you don’t look at the sky, if you get the chance. We’re used to weird stuff, here. We have to be. But nothing like this. Have you ever heard a forest scream?”

Buffy opened her mouth, shut it again. She swallowed. “And this – this is really happening? This is real?”

“Yes.”

“Could – could you say that out loud, for me?” She’d spent so long doubting the things she saw, so sure that they couldn’t possibly be real. But now other people were seeing them too. She’d thought that she was insane, and then she’d been told that she had powers and so she’d thought that she was only _functionally_ insane because she still couldn’t quite tell the difference between what was real and what wasn’t. But now the world was breaking and, despite herself, she couldn’t help but feel relieved.

“It’s real,” Ptonomy said gently. “This is all real. It’s all happening.” He sounded like he couldn’t quite believe what he was saying. That feeling was so familiar to her that it hurt. “Most of us left Summerland. Sure, the world out there might be dangerous for us, but it has to be better than this. Cary and Kerry are still here. Syd won’t leave until we find David. Melanie has nowhere else to go. And one other.”

“Who?” Buffy asked, mind turning. Lenny? She was dead, sure, but it wasn’t like that had stopped her from showing up before. She doubted it was Walter – she’d torn his mind to shreds. She couldn’t think who else it might be.

“She came floating down the river in a giant wicker basket the day after David brought you back.” Lenny. It had to be Lenny. 

Ptonomy looked at her intently. “Your mom.”


	34. Chapter Thirty-Four

Summerland had good, solid doors. It made sense, Buffy supposed. Even though Cary had installed various protections to make it less likely that Division Three would find the place, there was always the chance that they’d find it anyway. A strong door wasn’t _much_ of a defence against an assault team, but it was better than nothing. 

Buffy almost wished that there was an assault team on the other side of this particular door. At the very least it would mean that she knew where she stood. Of course, it wouldn’t be a place that she _liked_, but it had to better than this.

But there wasn’t an assault team on the other side of the door. There was just her mother. Buffy wondered what she was doing. Ptonomy had said that Joyce had stayed by her bedside until Kerry had practically forced her to get some rest. Somehow Buffy couldn’t believe that she was sleeping, though. She wouldn’t be if the positions were reversed. 

Ptonomy had offered to come with her. He’d tactfully pointed out that she was recovering from a bad case of being dead, and it might be a good idea if there was someone with her in case she had a relapse. With all the weird stuff going on, he’d said, he wouldn’t be surprised if she did. Buffy had turned him down. This whole thing was going to be awkward enough as it was. There was no need to add a third party.

She regretted it now, though. Not because she wanted Ptonomy around, but because if he _was_ around then she wouldn’t have an excuse to stand staring at a door for minutes on end. Technically, of course, she didn’t have an excuse. She didn’t think that there had been a creepy cackling snowman in this room the last time she’d been inside it counted. 

It wasn’t that she didn’t _want_ to see her mom. She did. Oh, she did. But she didn’t know what she’d actually _say_ to her. She hadn’t known what she was going to say when she’d raided Division Three to get her back, and she definitely didn’t know what she was going to say now. She’d just hoped that things would work themselves out. But Buffy wasn’t lucky like that. She wasn’t lucky _at all_.

So she stared at the door. She raised her hand to knock, but she didn’t. Her hand hung in the air, suspended in her indecision. After a long moment, she lowered it. She wondered if it was too late to go back to the infirmary. She could say she got lost. It wasn’t an unbelievable lie. Summerland was difficult to navigate at the best of times, and these were definitely not those. But no. She couldn’t do that. Apparently the only thing she could do was stand and stare and sweat.

As a result, Buffy was taken completely by surprise when the door opened. While she’d run through dozens of possible scenarios in her head, including several where there was still a snowman in the room, precisely none of them had involved someone else opening the door.

Joyce looked tired. There were great dark shadows under her eyes. Her shoulders were stooped, and her back was curved. Buffy knew enough to recognise deep muscle ache when she saw it. Sitting by a hospital bed wasn’t known for being comfortable. Neither was the dungeon of a militant hate-group, for that matter. 

There was no surprise on Joyce’s face. There was no expression at all – she had the look of someone who had seen too many things in too short a time to react to anything else. The only sign of feeling was in her white-knuckled grip of the door. She held onto it as though it was the only solid thing in a world cast adrift.

“How did you know I was here?” Buffy asked. Even as she spoke, she knew it was the wrong thing to say. There was just nothing else in her head. Everything else was too difficult to think about.

“Little bird told me.” Joyce shook her head slightly, as though she didn’t quite believe what she’d just said. “Literally, a little bird told me.”

Buffy wished that she could be surprised by that. “Oh. Right.”

After a moment of neither of them saying anything, Joyce stood aside. “Oh, come in, come in. Sit down.” She didn’t take her eyes off of her daughter. “How are you? You must be-“

“I’m okay,” Buffy said as she walked into the room. It was a lie, and both of them knew it. Buffy felt like she’d recently been riddled with bullets, and she looked like it too. “I’m okay. How are-“ she cut herself off. Asking how Joyce was coping would make everything too real. She wasn’t ready for that. Best to stick with the small talk for a while longer. “Are you okay?”

Joyce shrugged. The movement was stiff. “Not really.”

Buffy nodded. That made sense. “Guess everything is a little bit totally nutso.”

Joyce smiled wanly at that. As weak as the smile was, Buffy couldn’t help but reciprocate. “Yeah, it is. It really, really is.”

“You know, if you-“

“I was with you,” Joyce blurted suddenly. Buffy looked at her in surprise. “When you were… in the infirmary. I was there.”

“Oh. Going right into the deep stuff. Right.”

“Sorry. I guess you’re – are you still – are you-“

“No, it’s fine. I dig it,” Buffy said. “Ptonomy told me, by the way. That you were with me, I mean.”

“Right. Good.” Joyce rubbed the back of her neck absently. “When you were – when I was there, I thought about stuff. What I’d say when you woke up.”

“Good time for that.”

“I thought about this time – do you remember when you were younger, oh, fifteen or sixteen? You came home from school and you gave me this big hug. Like you didn’t want to let me go. You followed me around for days after that. You didn’t want to let me out of your sight. Remember?”

Buffy nodded.

“I tried to get you to talk. Something was wrong, something was clearly wrong, and I – I wondered if something had happened, you know? If someone was bullying you, o-or someone, some boy had – I thought about all these terrible things and you wouldn’t tell me. You just followed me around like a little puppy or something. It wasn’t until a long time later that you told me that it was because you’d seen me die. That you’d seen me get sick and die.” The words sounded stark and ugly.

“I know,” Buffy said thickly. “I remember.”

“It was so much worse than I thought it was. I mean, not that bullying or anything else is _good_, you know, ‘cause it’s not, but I could help with that. We could talk about it. Deal with it. Eventually. But how was I supposed to deal with the fact that you’d seen me when I was… sick? What was I supposed to do with that? I couldn’t help. So I… didn’t.”

Buffy would have liked to jump in and say that that wasn’t true. She would have liked to say that her mom had been great, that she’d been really supportive, that she’d helped a lot. She would have liked to say that, but she couldn’t. She remembered Joyce’s face when she told her about all the things she saw. She’d looked at Buffy like she’d grown a second head. Like some _thing_ had suddenly replaced her daughter. “It wasn’t your fault,” Buffy said. She was too late, and it was too little, but it needed to be said anyway. “It was a lot. Wasn’t your fault that you couldn’t deal.” She smiled bitterly. “Not like I checked myself into Clockworks because I was so great at the whole dealing thing either.”

“I thought a lot about that, you know. What I could have done. I know I… didn’t visit. I’m sorry about that. It was – it sounds bad, but-“ Joyce looked down at her hands. “I thought you’d hate me. It was… easier not to go.”

“I don’t hate you.” She had, once. Oh, not here, not in this world. She’d hated the mother who couldn’t understand that she was the Slayer, who couldn’t accept that that was just the way she was. She’d hated Joyce for barring her from her own home on the same day that she’d gone out to kill the man she loved. She _had_ hated her. But she’d gotten over it. She’d understood. “I get it. Honestly, I get it.” For a moment she wanted to say that she’d wanted to get out of this situation so much that she’d actually become someone else, but then she remembered that she wasn’t talking to a mutant. She didn’t think that Joyce would understand. “I’m not saying that I _liked_ it or anything. The whole thing definitely wasn’t a thing that’s good. It still isn’t, I guess. But I get it. I mean, after Clockworks collapsed, it’s not like I called you or let you know I was alive or anything. I thought about it, but I thought it would just be easier if I didn’t.” Of course, the fact that some military goons wanted her dead had made a large impact on that decision, but they definitely hadn’t been the only factor.

Joyce’s shoulders drooped. Buffy realised that a large portion of the tension her mother was carrying wasn’t due to sitting in an uncomfortable chair next to her injured daughter, or whatever dungeon Division Three had put her in. It was nice to know that she wasn’t the only person who’d been worried about how this conversation would go. “Thank you,” she said, her voice small. She sniffed slightly, then looked up at Buffy. “So. A mutant, huh?”

“So they tell me.”

“What’s it like? I mean, I understand the whole Cary/Kerry thing, even if it’s kinda weird-“

“I know, right?”

“- and Memory Man seems pretty self-explanatory, but seems like no one around here really knows what you actually _do_.”

“Yeah, not really clear on that one myself.” Buffy took a deep breath. “Well, um, you know all the stuff? Demons and magic and Slayers and stuff? Turns out that’s all real. Was all real. It was a whole world out there somewhere. But then someone killed it and I acted like some sort of, like, lifeboat or something and carried it all over here. Sometimes it leaks out and stuff happens. Also it makes my brain sound weird.”

Joyce looked at her. “I don’t get any of what you just said.”

“Yeah, me neither. Best I can work out is I’ve got a world inside my head. Don’t know how to do anything with it. Don’t know who killed it, or how I got here. Don’t know if I only exist because I ran away from a dying world. Guess that’s an existential crisis to give Dawn a run for her money.” She paused, seeing that Joyce didn’t understand a word she was saying. “Which totally isn’t the point.”

“And does… all of that stuff have anything to do with the stuff that’s going on here? I wasn’t kidding about the little bird telling me that you were outside, and I don’t know if you’ve looked at the sky.”

“Not exactly. There’s someone from Clockworks, David – he’s a mutant, too. He reads minds. Apparently he teleports too, I guess. But he’s got something in his head. Some kind of parasite thingy.” Buffy decided it wouldn’t clarify matters if she told Joyce that it had taken the form of an Australian curate. “We worked out that it was there a little while back, and I’m guessing that it’s given up on doing the whole hiding thing. Don’t know what it wants. Not really even sure that it wants anything. I mean, I’m not sure that it is a thing that wants things. Best I can tell it just likes to mess with people’s heads.” Buffy shrugged. “Now that we know it’s there, it seems to be going full tilt on the wackiness. Suppose its enjoying the spotlight.”

Always nice to be seen, Caleb had said. She had no doubt that the parasite was sentient. It had been busy hiding from David by being inside his own head, but now that people knew it existed it had decided that it didn’t need to hide anymore. She wasn’t sure what messing with people’s heads actually did for it, but obviously it got something out of it. 

“Okay,” Joyce said in a voice which clearly stated that it wasn’t. “So what happens now, then? Your friend, David – he’s stuck in maze that popped up in a second. The sky’s empty, there’s nothing to eat but cherry pie, and little cartoon birds fly around and deliver messages. I get that you – all of you – can do things, but what can you do about that?”

“Don’t know. I suspect Cary can – hold on a second. What did you say about the cherry pie?”

“Kitchen’s full of it. Don’t get me wrong, I like a slice of pie as much as the next person, but it’s not exactly the sort of thing to base a diet on.”

There hadn’t been any cherry pie before Buffy had left. She knew that for a fact. She also knew someone who could happily eat nothing but cherry pie. 

David.

Buffy couldn’t imagine why the parasite would want to let Joyce know that she was there. But David would. If he was stuck somewhere, in the maze, in his head, wherever – maybe it was the closest that he could come to a message in a bottle. He needed someone to come and get him. Specifically, he needed _Buffy_.

She didn’t know why. She wasn’t a Slayer. She couldn’t fight the parasite. She couldn’t invent some sort of device to exterminate it, either. All she had was a dead world in her head, and she didn’t even know what to do with it. The only answer that she could come up with was that there was something in her head that he needed.

She closed her eyes. She was tired. She’d been tired before she’d even opened her eyes back in the infirmary, and she was tired now. She just wanted to rest. But there was more to do. There was always more to do. That’s the thing about being chosen. You don’t ever get to choose.

“I think I need to go through the maze,” Buffy said wearily. “I need to find David.”

“And then what?”

“No idea. But he’s still… somewhere, trying to reach out. The bird was him. The pie too. He needs me for something. I’ve got to go.”

“But the maze – people went in it, looking for him. They didn’t come back. It’s dangerous.” Buffy’s eyes snapped open and she flinched as something touched her hand. It was only Joyce. “I only just got you back.”

“I know.” Buffy put her hand over Joyce’s, feeling for all the world like a parent telling their child that they have to go to work. “But I have to go.”

She braced herself. She could see Joyce drawing herself up, preparing for the same ultimatum that she’d given in the other world. She braced herself to be told that if she went into the maze, then she might as well not come back out again. But then Joyce deflated. “I guess you do.”

Buffy stood. “Well. See you on the other side.” She turned to leave without waiting for Joyce to say anything. She didn’t want to hear it. She’d never been good at leaving.

Even so, she couldn’t help but smile as she heard Joyce call out “Good luck!”


	35. Chapter Thirty-Five

About a minute after leaving, Buffy realised a couple of things. The first was that she hadn’t had to leave. Or, rather, she hadn’t had to leave right then. She’d practically run out of the room. She’d felt like she had no choice but to get away, to get _out_. She’d said that David was trying to send her a message, and she believed that was true – but she’d been dead or unconscious for days. David could wait a little while longer. Anyway, the parasite wouldn’t kill him. David’s head was its home. She didn’t think it was going to burn it down. Running out of the room just then hadn’t been exactly the same as walking out to kill Angelus and save the world, but it was close. In both cases, she just hadn’t been able to deal with a mom who just as lost and confused as she was.

The second thing she realised was that she didn’t actually know where she was going. She’d never been to Melanie’s therapy room. In fact, she’d hardly spoken to the other woman at all. Ironically, she had to find the maze before she could get lost in it. 

From a certain point of view, the fastest and easiest thing to do would be to go back and ask Joyce. She clearly knew where it was. From another much more personal perspective, though, that was pretty much impossible. She couldn’t be the powerful mutant who knew what she was doing if she had to go back and ask her mother for directions. Of course, she didn’t know what she was doing, but she couldn’t let her mom know that. She worried enough as it was.

Instead Buffy decided to ask Cary. His lab was close by, and she had no doubts whatsoever that he’d be in it. He’d know where the maze was and, of all the people in Summerland, he was probably the most likely person to actually tell her where it was.

So she walked. Her footsteps were slow and deliberate. If she moved quickly, she’d end up running and she wasn’t sure when she’d stop. Last time she’d felt like this she’d ended up in LA for months. Her walk was careful and measured, and she counted every step. It was better than thinking. _Anything_ was better than thinking.

It wasn’t long before she was at the door to Cary’s lab. She heard voices – Cary’s, Kerry’s – but she couldn’t hear what they were saying. She paused for a moment, knocked, and then walked in before they had a chance to respond.

Cary was sitting as his desk. His walking stick was leaning against his chair, and there was a mess of wiring and machinery laid out in front of him. Kerry was standing on the other side of the desk, leaning against it. Her face was close to Cary’s. For a moment she looked upset, but when Buffy walked in she whirled away and a mask dropped into place. They’d been fighting about something, and Buffy had interrupted.

Cary cleared his throat and ran a finger under his collar. “Hello, Buffy. Good to see you up and about.” His pleasant tone was undermined by the fact that Kerry was scowling at her.

“Um. Yeah. Totally. I’m glad about the whole not being dead thing too. Anyway, I wanted to know where the maze is. I mean, Ptonomy told me that one sprouted in the therapy room and, uh, I wanted to know where that is.”

“Why?” Kerry said sharply.

Now that she had to talk about it, the whole thing about David sending her messages seemed kind of stupid. After all, it wasn’t like he had actually sent _her_ messages. Sure, the cherry pie thing definitely seemed David-like, but if he could do something like that then he probably could have sent something much more direct. A cartoon bird telling her mom that she was outside her room probably didn’t count. “Because David’s in there, and I want to get him out?” She hadn’t meant to make that a question. Kerry’s unrelenting scowl was remarkably intimidating. It made Buffy understand the reactions of all the people that she’d scowled at when she’d been the Slayer.

Cary shot Kerry a look, clearly telling her to take it easy. If she noticed, she gave no sign of it. “You know that people have gone in after him already and none of them have come back?”

Buffy nodded. “Yeah, I heard. But the parasite thingy went out of its way to tell David that I was dying. I don’t think it went through all that just to bump me off in some whacky maze.” She hoped. “Plus David saved me. I owe him for that.”

“Why don’t you use your powers and smash your way through the maze?” Kerry said, her voice dripping with scorn.

“What?” Buffy said. Then her eyes widened in understanding. Kerry had encountered Buffy while she’d been doing the whole Glory thing. She had probably never been beaten like that before. Kerry was, physically, the closest thing to a Slayer in this world. There were no vampires or anything like that, so nothing could come close to posing an actual challenge for her. Until Glory showed up. She hadn’t even had to hurt Kerry. The other girl had been less than an insect to her, and they both knew it.

Well, Buffy definitely knew what _that_ felt like. “Listen, Kerry. About the whole, uh, Walter thing. That wasn’t me. I mean, it was, but it wasn’t _just_ me, you know? Still getting a handle on the whole mutant thingy. So, anyway. Sorry.” It was poor apology, but there wasn’t really anything else that could say.

“Kerry knows that,” Cary said. Kerry shot him a quick glare. “D’you remember where Ptonomy’s memory room is, Buffy?”

“Uh huh.”

“The maze is just around the corner from there. You can’t miss it.”

“Okay.” She looked at Kerry, wondering if she should say anything else. Nothing came to mind. The girl didn’t say anything either. “Okay. I, um, I guess I’ll be off then,” she said after a long pause.

Neither of them said goodbye. Kerry began speaking to Cary, low and urgent, almost before Buffy left the room. She wondered what it was like to have an argument with someone who was literally part of you.

~*~

It didn’t take long to find the room with the maze in it.

Well, technically, she didn’t find it. What she actually found was Syd.

The other woman had managed to get a deck chair from somewhere. She was lying on it, eyes closed and with her hands were folded behind her head. It was an incongruous image – she looked like she was sunning herself, but she was wearing a black dress, black knee-high boots and, from what Buffy could see, black leather gloves. And, of course, she was indoors. All in all, Syd was wearing the clothes of someone who didn’t want to be touched by the sun, let alone another person.

Though her eyes were shut, she quite clearly wasn’t asleep. Her pose should have given the impression of sleepy relaxation, but no one could look like that and be relaxed. Everything about her looked tense, even if she was trying to hide it.

Buffy looked at the door that Syd was lounging in front of. She didn’t doubt that the maze was on the other side – if her boyfriend had been swallowed by a sudden maze, she’d be sticking as close to the entrance as she could get as well. She frowned. Actually, that wasn’t true. She’d be in there looking for him.

“I can’t go in,” Syd said, as though she’d read Buffy’s mind.

Buffy jumped slightly at the sudden voice. She _knew_ that she hadn’t made any noise. She’d been very careful about that. If her slow and deliberate footsteps made no noise, then it meant that any footsteps that she _did_ hear weren’t hers. Plus, concentrating on making no noise meant that she didn’t have to concentrate on anything else. “How did you know that I was here?”

Syd’s eyes opened slowly, almost lazily. “I can feel people when they’re close by. Like ants under my skin.”

“Oh.” Buffy hadn’t known that. She took a step backwards. Syd smiled faintly. “Why can’t you go in?”

Syd didn’t reply. Instead, she just levered herself into a standing position. She opened the door in front of her.

When Buffy had been told that a maze had grown up in the room, she’d expected it to be a hedge maze. Or something plant-like, at the very least.

Technically, the walls of the maze were plant-like. They definitely looked like giant, leafy hedges. They were also made out of stone. Incredibly detailed, intricate and well-carved stone, but still stone. Even if Buffy half-expected to see the leaves swaying in the breeze.

She blinked. There shouldn’t have been a breeze. They were inside. Her gaze moved upwards, and she immediately regretted it.

The room that had once been Melanie’s now had no roof. Normally, that wouldn’t have been much of an issue – at least, not any more of one than a sudden maze in the first place. The issue, though, was that it meant that Buffy could see the sky.

It wasn’t there. Oh, she could see the sun, a few wispy clouds – but there was nothing between them. Nothing at all. That wasn’t to say that she could see a starry night sky or anything. There was nothing there. No. It was more than that. It was the complete and total absence of thing. It was like the sky had been there, and it had been taken away, and had left in its place not nothing, exactly, but negative sky. Not a hole in reality, not a tear in the universe. Just truly, genuinely empty space. 

It was blue.

_”They say the sky’s blue, but it ain’t. Nothing’s ever blue. Blue’s the colour of absence. Of things that have no other colour to be.”_

Buffy doubled over as though she had been punched in the gut. She felt sick. The sky was _wrong_. Nothing like that should happen. Nothing like that should be _possible_. No one could just pluck out the sky and leave nothing but the colour blue in its place.

“Yeah, probably best if you don’t look up,” Syd said drily.

After a moment, Buffy straightened. After another moment of waiting to see if she was going to vomit after all, she said “Thanks for the warning,” acidly.

Syd didn’t reply. She just thrust her hand through the doorway. Or, rather, she tried. Her hand crossed the threshold and vanished. At the same moment, a hand wearing a black leather glove reached through from the maze room and waved. It wasn’t attached to anything. There was no one inside the room. Buffy looked at Syd, then back at the hand. The hand was definitely Syd’s. It just wasn’t attached to her at the moment.

“I can’t go in,” Syd said. “Every time I try, I get forced out again.” She withdrew her hand and looked down at it as though it had failed her. “Everyone else can go in fine, but not me. I get forced out.”

Buffy could read the expression on the other woman’s face, clear as day. _He doesn’t want me. He won’t let me get close._ She would have hugged Syd, but switching bodies seemed like a really bad idea. She looked back at the maze. “He wants to keep you safe,” Buffy said. “Trust me. I know something about pushing people away to keep them safe.”

She could feel Syd looking at her, but she didn’t look back. Instead, she pretended as though her shoes were so fascinating that she really needed to stare at them. It was true. She did know about pushing people away to keep them safe. She also knew about pushing people away to keep _herself_ safe. About putting up barriers and keeping people on the other side of them, so that she could hide herself away where no one could hurt her. She knew David well, probably better than anyone alive – but she couldn’t say for certain which one this was. She hoped, for Syd’s sake, that she wasn’t lying.

“Thanks,” Syd said quietly, after a long moment. Then, louder, “Are you going to bring him back?”

“That’s the plan.”

Syd squared her shoulders. “Good luck.”

“Thank you.” She took a deep breath, and then walked into the maze.

She looked back, and was not surprised to see that there was now no hint that there had ever been a door. There was just the maze, and blue empty space above.


	36. Chapter Thirty-Six

The maze was oddly quiet. It was summer, but there were no birds singing. There were no insects. The stone hedges that formed the walls of the maze didn’t rustle or shift in the wind, no matter how much they looked like they were going to. The only sound was the wind itself. It ebbed and flowed but never quite stopped. At times, Buffy thought that it was trying to tell her something, that it was whispering a message that she couldn’t quite catch. _Ice_, perhaps, or _eyes_. 

There was nothing else beyond the wind. There was no sign of any of the people that had gone in before her. There was nothing but the wind, and Buffy walking beneath the empty blue space where the sky had been. 

She came to a fork. Each path looked identical. It occurred to Buffy that she could probably take either of them – if David was trying to help her, then she’d end up wherever she needed to be. That said, if the parasite had the upper hand, then Buffy would probably end up wandering around forever. It didn’t matter which direction she took, not when someone with the power to kill worlds was involved.

Nevertheless, Buffy hesitated. This seemed important. It was a choice. Neither the parasite nor David had any reason to give her one – in fact, it would be in both their best interests if they didn’t. What if one path was David’s, and one wasn’t? She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t be sure.

She closed her eyes, turning blindly to face down one path and then the other. If there was a difference between them, she couldn’t tell. She didn’t have the enhanced senses of a Slayer. She opened her eyes and licked her finger. The wind seemed to be coming from every direction at once, or none at all, so that was no help.

But the right hand path was ever so slightly colder than the left. She remembered leaving her room in the Astral Plane and watching frost winding its way down the corridor, taking the right hand path. She remembered Ptonomy being healed by some sort of magic ice stuff. She remembered a creepy snowman.

She went left.

She found something almost instantly. So quickly, in fact, that Buffy should have been able to see it from the fork. It hadn’t been there a few seconds ago, she was sure, but it was here now. 

It was a small headstone. It was made out of a dirty grey stone. There was a name on it.

_GLORY_

Beneath the name there was an intricate carving of a rickety tower. Buffy recognised it. She’d seen it before. She’d had dreams about it. The tower was the reason that she was freaked out by heights. She’d died jumping off of it.

There was a gun lying on the ground in front of it. Buffy recognised it, too. The last time she’d seen it, it had been the hands of a sniper at Division Three. She picked it up.

“Is it loaded?” Said someone from behind her. Buffy jumped as the sudden sound broke the eerie quiet. She turned to see Maggie Walsh.

Buffy shrugged. “How would I know? Guns aren’t really my thing. I mean, apart from the people shooting at me thing, I guess, and _those_ guns were definitely…” she trailed off as she looked back at the headstone. 

Glory had been shot. Or, rather, she’d been shot when she’d been Glory. She’d been broken, bleeding, dying, and a goddess. She _had_ died. She remembered that. She’d gotten better. Glory hadn’t.

“Well, if you want to know, then-“

“I don’t. I really, really don’t.” Buffy put the gun down. Only the fact that she was afraid that it might go off stopped her from dropping it as though it had burned her. _”Bullets in your lungs, stomach, throat,”_ she thought – bullets from _this_ gun.

“Ah, yes. You prefer stakes and swords.”

“Yeah,” Buffy said absently, not really paying any attention to what the other woman was saying. “This is Glory’s grave.”

“Cenotaph, technically.”

“What?”

“Cenotaph. She isn’t buried there. She isn’t buried anywhere. There’s just an empty tomb.”

“But… why? Who’d put up a gravesto- a thingy, centaurtaph, for Glory?”

“She died so that you wouldn’t,” Walsh said. “Like your friends. Like your _world_. Everyone died so that you could live. You survive because everyone else dies, and parts of yourself die with them.”

“No,” Buffy said slowly. “I don’t buy it. I mean, yeah, my world is dead, but there’s no way that it died so that I wouldn’t. I’ve died before, and the world kept spinning. No.” She tapped the engraved tower. “I died there. They put up a gravestone for me. Not a centaur thingy, an actual tombstone. I was buried there.”

Walsh shrugged. “After my time.”

“Don’t give me that, you know what I – wait. This is me. This is like, I don’t know, some kind of metaphor or something. I’m like this thing – an empty tomb for a dead world. That’s what Oliver said. I’m empty so things start falling in. Dead people. Glory’s corpse might not be here, but there’s _space_ for it – and if someone put some other dead guy here, who’d know? It’s all the same when you’re dead and buried.”

“I suppose you’d know.”

“Okay. So, someone, David, Ipsum, whatever – they’re trying to tell me that they know what I am. But why? Not like I can hide it from psychics.”

“The obvious answer would be that their checking whether _you_ know what you are.”

Buffy looked up sharply. “What?”

Walsh looked back at her blandly. “Well, do you?”

“Up until thirty seconds ago I’d have said yes, but you’re doing that teachery thing so I’m kinda thinking that the answer might be no,” Buffy said. “And I’m going guess that you’ll be totally cryptic if I ask you.”

“I’m in your head, Summers. I know what you know. The thing you haven’t grasped yet is that _you_ know what _I_ know. When we said that you weren’t ready to know, we weren’t lying. You refused to know. You still refuse to know. Instead, your mind conjures ghosts.”

“You sound like Ipsum,” Buffy said suspiciously. “Are you?”

“Would it matter if I was?” Walsh said. “Would it matter if I wasn’t? We’d still be here, lost in a maze.”

“Okay then. Whatever. I don’t need to listen to this.” Buffy turned and walked away.

“That’s exactly the problem,” Walsh said, easily keeping pace with her. “You don’t listen. You run. You hide. For you, there is only now. The future is ‘totally cryptic’ and the past is dead. You hide in the ignorant present.”

“You know, I never actually finished Psychology 101. At least the shrinks at Clockworks tried to make sense.”

“Yes, but they didn’t get anywhere. Ordinary psychiatrists can’t deal with a girl with a dead world in her head. You didn’t even try to talk to Melanie.”

“I didn’t have the time! I had to go rescue David, then they had my mom, and then the entire world went mad and the sky vanished.”

“Exactly,” Walsh said, as though Buffy had made her own point for her. 

“Wow. You really got me there.”

“Unlikely. Anyway, you’d better start paying attention.” Walsh pointed ahead. “Look like there’s a puzzle for you.”

Buffy looked. There was a full-length mirror in the middle of the path. It had a plain wooden frame, and it was attached to the top of the hedges by two thin pieces of string that didn’t look like they could possibly hold its weight. Two more strings were attached to the bottom of the mirror and were dangling down on the floor. The strings held the mirror a few inches off the ground. It swung gently in the breeze. She’d seen the mirror before, in Oliver’s floating iceberg.

Somewhat warily, she looked at her reflection. She looked like she’d aged at least a decade since she’d last looked in a mirror. There were lines on her face caused by pain and tiredness that she was sure hadn’t been there before. Her shoulders were hunched. Her eyes, though, looked exactly like they should.

“Okay, what’s this supposed to be?”

“It’s a mirror,” Walsh supplied helpfully.

Buffy rolled her eyes. “No duh. But why’s it here?”

Walsh didn’t reply. Buffy turned back to the mirror. Unsurprisingly, it looked like a mirror. It _didn’t_ look like a puzzle. It was just a mirror. It didn’t do anything other than sway in the wind. She moved around the back. It looked exactly like the back of a mirror. There was even a space for someone to hook it onto a wall. If it hadn’t been for the fact that it was in a weird place, Buffy wouldn’t have given it a second glance.

Then there was a voice. It was somewhat muffled. It sounded like it was coming from a long way away, and it was also surprisingly tinny. It was a male voice, and it took Buffy a couple of seconds before she recognised it as belonging to Rudy.

“Buffy? Is that you? Can you hear me? Can you get me out?”

Buffy looked around for the source of the voice. There was nothing – at least, nothing apart from the mirror and the smirking evil science lady leaning against the stone hedge. Buffy walked back in front of the mirror. This time, she didn’t look at herself. She examined the background behind her. She knew that it should be identical to what she could see if she just turned around, but this wasn’t the sort of place where things happen the way they should. Even so, she couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

“Where are you?” Buffy said. At least, that’s what she intended to say. What she actually said, however, was “I’m trapped in the mirror.” As the spoke, there was an odd echo, as though someone was speaking at the same time as her. Someone muffled, tinny, and far away. 

Buffy frowned. Her reflection mirrored her. “Rudy? Was that you?” 

There was no echo, and no reply.

“Did you hear him?” Buffy thought about saying to Walsh. What she actually said was “Yes. Can you get me out? There’s something out there, in the place where there’s nothing to reflect. Something moving in the dark.”

“Hmm,” Walsh murmured, peering over Buffy’s shoulder. She didn’t show up in the mirror. “Your reflection’s hijacked your voice. Lacan would have a field day.”

“Yeah, now’s really not the time for obscure psychology jokes that no one gets. How do we get him out?”

“How would I know? I was a scientist. Magic mirrors weren’t really my area.”

Buffy planned to ask Rudy how he’d gotten trapped in the mirror in the first place. “My powers don’t work here. Everything’s flat. If there was something solid I might be able to do something.”

Buffy took a step back and looked at the two strings trailing on the floor. They looked like they’d been cut.

It wasn’t a puzzle. It was a trap. The mirror had been strung up overhead, and Rudy had triggered it somehow. No one wanted to look up when there was a chance that they’d see the non-existent sky. He hadn’t seen the mirror until the trap had been triggered. The mirror had swung down and, somehow, Rudy had been trapped in it.

“Can you touch the mirror?” She asked. No echo. No reply. The reflection could only talk when she talked, Buffy realised. It stole her voice, but it had to be her decision to use it. She opened her mouth.

“No. I don’t seem to have any substance unless you’re there. I just… fade away. Things drift here. There were others with me. They’re gone now. They couldn’t hold on.” Panic coloured Buffy’s voice. “You have to get me out of here!”

Okay. How could she give depth to a reflection? It looked like it had depth – she could see the path stretched out behind her. It looked so real. Like she could just walk into the mirror and just keep going.

“Who’s Lacan and why’d he have a field day with this?” Buffy asked as she mulled over the problem. She felt like there was something right in front of her that she was missing, something really simple, but she just couldn’t seem to work out what it was.

“French psychoanalyst,” Walsh said, effortlessly shifting from ‘vaguely menacing evil scientist’ to ‘university lecturer’. “His most famous theory was based around the concept of ‘the mirror stage’. Essentially, at a certain point an infant is able to recognise themselves in a mirror. That’s the point at which they first become aware of the difference between ‘I’ and ‘the Other’. It’s a little bit more complicated than that, of course, but that’s the gist of it.”

Buffy blinked as the wind blew, constantly whispering _Is_. She remembered a movie trailer voice booming out over a desert. _The World Killed, with water in her eyes and water in her lungs, comes to realise the difference between the other that is herself and the other that is merely other._

In the mirror there was the image of herself, but it wasn’t really her. It was Rudy, trapped, using the only form that he had available. There was Walsh standing at her shoulder, who had no reflection at all. Then, finally, there was herself. The other that was merely other, the other that was herself, and Buffy. 

In the end, what was the difference between the path in the mirror and the one behind her? Buffy took a deep breath, and walked forwards.

Into the mirror.

There was a momentary sense of pressure, of cool glass on her skin. Then the world exploded. Shards flew past her, reflecting-

-nothing at all-

-and behind the broken shards that had been the world there was something like a dark, cold cloud, and in it something was moving-

-and then the world was back again. Rudy was standing where the mirror had been. He looked down at himself, as though he wasn’t really sure that he was there. He pinched himself, and winced. “What,” he said slowly, “was that?”

“Someone wanting to make sure that I know what I am.”

“What?”

Buffy shook her head as though to clear it. “Doesn’t matter. Isn’t important. You should go.”

“You’re kidding, right? You saw what just happened. Whatever it was, this place is mad. It’s dangerous.”

“Yeah, I got that, thanks. But it was built for me. He’s waiting for me. The man with the girl inside him.” Buffy smiled sadly. “I thought she was talking about Cary.”

“I’m assuming you aren’t going to make sense if I ask you what you’re talking about, right?”

“Probably not. The whole world isn’t exactly doing so hot on the whole sense-making department at the moment.”

“Right,” Rudy said, looking disconcerted. “Well, if you’re sure…”

“I’m not. I’m totally, totally not. But there’s… someone I need to talk to.”

“You need to talk to ‘dramatic pause’ someone? Who?”

“The World Killer, I guess. The person who killed my world.”


	37. Chapter Thirty-Seven

Rudy was talking, trying to convince Buffy that she shouldn’t go on ahead by herself. Buffy was trying to get him to leave – while the maze was dangerous, she didn’t think that it was dangerous for _her_.

But as they argued, Rudy became quieter and quieter. Not because out of any conscious effort on his part, as far as Buffy could tell. He was still talking in the same way that he had been before. There was just less noise. His voice was less effective than it had been.

Although, Buffy thought after a few seconds, it was probably more accurate to say that he was less _solid_ than he had been. He was slightly transparent and, with every passing second, he was fading even more. It wasn’t just Rudy, either. The entire world was dwindling away. Soon, everything looked like it was made of ice, transparent and cold. Then there wasn’t even that. There was only a cloud.

There was a cloud, and in it, something was moving.

Buffy didn’t want to move towards it. She knew, deep in her bones, that it wouldn’t be anything good. But she didn’t have a choice. Everything had been building to this moment. 

So she walked. Her footsteps, slow and deliberate, made no noise. There was nothing solid to make a noise with. Even the constant wind was gone.

She walked, and walked, and walked. The thing moving in the distance, just at the edge of sight, got no closer. Eventually Buffy stopped. She wasn’t moving. Oh, she was putting one foot in front of the other, but she wasn’t actually getting anywhere. Moving without motion. Cause without effect.

So she stopped, and thought, and smiled. _”Look behind you.”_ She turned.

There was a great, dark tree looming above her. In the world that was cloud, it was as solid as only a void could be. It was black, twisted, gnarled. It was incredibly fine grained and seemed to glisten slightly. It looked like it had grown into two almost separate halves. Each trunk arched up and curled over to rest where the ground would be. For a moment, Buffy saw a figure with two arms reaching up from underground, bracing itself as it freed itself. In the blink of an eye it was there, in the blink of an eye it was gone. 

She’d seen the tree before – or, rather, she’d seen something that similar. It was the same wood as the stumps that Ipsum had used as chairs in his gallery.

From each of the two trunks hung a swing. They were very simple – nothing more than a couple of ropes and a rough wooden slat. They swung gently, although there was no wind to move them.

“You know what?” Buffy said to the world in general. “I’ve had _enough_. All of this creeping and total mind-gameage. Not things that are good. So if you’re going to keep playing games, then play them with me. Come out and play.”

In the blink of an eye, Lenny was sitting on one of the swings. She looked like she had the last time Buffy had seen her – or, at least, the last time that she’d seen her _alive_. Her hair was greasy and wild, and her headphones were clamped over her ears. Her legs kicked back and forth to the beat of whatever she was listening to. Her eyes were closed. If she knew that Buffy was there, she gave no sign of it.

Buffy shook her head. “No. Not you. I’m not David. I won’t be tricked by a face that you’ve plucked from my head. I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere. No matter what total madness you start coming up with.”

In the blink of an eye, Lenny was gone. In her place was Ipsum, sitting in his paint-spattered overalls. He, too, had his eyes closed.

“Not you either. I don’t think that’s you. I think – you know what I think? I think you’re hiding yourself away. All these faces are just masks.”

Ipsum flickered in place, becoming the devil with the yellow eyes, a child-sized figure with an enormous papier-mâché head bared in a perpetual snarl, a blood-red spider the size of a fist sitting in the middle of a vast web, and, incongruously, a small beagle.

Finally the form settled. It was a middle-aged man in an expensive suit, with olive skin, short, dark hair and a thin, neat moustache. He was wearing large, dark sunglasses that made it impossible to see his eyes. Buffy wasn’t surprised to see that they were tinted a deep yellow. He sat on the swing as though it was a throne.

“Is that really you?”

He inclined in his head.

“Who are you?”

He didn’t reply. At least, he didn’t reply directly. Instead, music began to play.

_Pleased allow me please introduce myself. I’m a man of wealth and taste…_

Buffy fought down the inappropriate urge to giggle. “Well, you hit that one right on the nose. Do you have a name, though? There’s totally not a way that has me calling you Lucifer.”

“Amahl Farouk,” he said. His voice was deep and gravelly, coloured by an accent that Buffy didn’t recognise. Something Middle Eastern, she’d guess. “_Le Roi d’Ombre._” That was French. Buffy recognised it from years of failing it in school. Even so, she understood what he’d said. It wasn’t that it automatically translated it into English. She heard the French, but something inside her understood what it meant.

The Shadow King. That wasn’t ominous at _all_.

“So, uh, any chance that you go away and find some other shadow you want to rule over? I hear the shadows in Bora Bora are nice this time of year.”

“I think not. Let us talk, you and I. There are some things that need to be said.” _’Cause what’s confusing you is just the nature of my game…_

“Is there though? You’ve been twisting David’s head for years and years and years. You’re the bad guy. Like, you’ve even got your own theme tune.”

Farouk tilted his head back slightly and smiled. “It is good to be seen. You know this feeling, I think.” Although he phrased it as a question, it quite clearly wasn’t. “You hid away a part of yourself and called it insane. When you met people who told you otherwise, who saw you as a person, whole and clear – ah! _C’est magnifique_.”

“Oh, we’re at the villainous ramble part. Cool. Let me know when I should pay attention.”

He looked at her. Though she couldn’t see his eyes, she felt the weight of his gaze as though she’d been shrouded in a lead blanket. “The problem, of course, is that what people see is always a mask. People look at you, they see the Slayer. _Die Jägerin_.” German, Buffy recognised. Of course, she knew even less German than she did French, but nevertheless she understood what he’d said. Seemed like she understood the word _Slayer_ in every language. “It is important. The definite article. _The_ Slayer. _Du bist nicht einer, der emordet_.” You are not someone who slays. “It is not an action that you carry out. It is an integral part of you. Even when there were many, you were still _the_ Slayer, singular and alone.”

Buffy yawned theatrically. “Are we heading towards the place where points are yet?”

“We all wear masks. Some of them we choose. Some are forced upon us.”

“Yeah, and some turn people in zombies. Listen, I didn’t go trekking through some bizarre maze just to stand here and have, I don’t know, philosophy spouted at me.”

Suddenly Amahl clapped his hands together. The sound was loud and brash in the world that was cloud. “Then let us cut to the chase!” _I shouted out “Who killed Kennedy?”, when, after all, it was you and me._ “David killed your world.”

Buffy rocked back on her heels. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. She’d suspected it since she’d started talking to Rudy and, if she was honest, she should have figured it out a long time before that. Having someone called the World Killer around when you have a dead world in your head should have been a pretty big clue.

But there was a world of difference between suspecting something and having it confirmed. The pain cut through her like a razor wire. Her mind was swamped by loss and grief and _betrayal_.

“You were to be a weapon, just as you were in your world. A sword to be wielded in the revolution. He was threatened by me, but he couldn’t beat me. Not by himself. I am woven into the fabric of his life. So he went looking for help. He found you.”

Buffy mulled that over. “That doesn’t make sense. We’re the same age. I’m pretty sure baby David didn’t see you and think ‘Oh, I’d better go kill a world to find some kind of brain parasite exterminator’. Super-duper powerful he might be, but at that point I don’t think he was thinking anything past ‘goo-goo-gah-gah’.”

“_Qu’est-ce le différence entre une monde qui est n’être, et une qu’est pas encore naître?_” Buffy frowned. For the first time, Farouk had said something in another language that she wasn’t quite sure that she understood. Either he’d said ‘What’s the difference between a world that is not to be, and one that is not yet born?’ or he’d said ‘What’s the difference between a world that is yet to be born, and one which does not yet exist?’. Functionally they were the same question, she supposed, but given the fact that she’d _repeatedly_ been told that the things that people said were important, she was willing to be that there was something that she was missing. “When you have the power of a god, the laws of time become mere guidelines.”

At first Buffy was inclined to dismiss that as standard villainous grandstanding, but then she realised that he probably had a point. When Illyria had first been put into Fred’s body, she’d played with time as though it had been just a toy to her. As powerful as the Old One had been, though, she hadn’t been strong enough to kill the world. At least not while trapped and weakened in a human body. If David was as powerful as everyone seemed to think he was…

“Okay. Fine. Sure. David from the future killed my world so that I’d be here and now to help him stop you. Seems a little bit out there, but then so does pretty much everything else these days. Still not really sure what I’m supposed to-“ Buffy drew a sharp breath and looked at Farouk closely. “Oh.”

Farouk nodded encouragingly. 

“When did you die?” Buffy said.

Farouk laughed. “A long time ago, my dear. There was a battle. I lost. I ran. I ran until I found a place where I could live.”

“You found David’s mind.”

“Your mind is loud, but it’s _nothing_ compared to his. It’s an inferno. _Une soleil_.” A sun.

“So, back when I went to get David and Division Three ambushed us, when Walter was attacking my mind – that cloud thing, the figure made out of clouds, the one that ran and ran until it burned away, was that you? I thought it was me. Creepy eye thing chasing… someone after the whole thing with Walter’s mutanting going for the eyeball seemed pretty much like me. Were you, I don’t know, killed by some eyeball thing?” Buffy shook her head as she heard herself speak. The eyeball that had oblivion in its gaze and stalked along using eyelashes as legs had been more nightmarish than anything Buffy had ever seen. More than vampires, magic, demons – even more than the devil with the yellow eyes, as impossible and alien as that had seemed. The eye had been had been horrific in the same way that nightmares were. Something like that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world. 

Then Buffy realised how ridiculous that was. She was standing in a world made of cloud, talking to a dead man who seemed to have stolen the sky. Of course a Nightmare Eyeball Monster could be real.

“I was peaceful. I flourished. One day, a man came. A white man – that is important, yes? He came and he saw the way that I was running things and he said “No more. Your ways are not my ways, your thoughts are not my thoughts.” There was a battle, and he cast me out.” There was no hint of bitterness. In fact, his voice had an almost sing-song quality, as though he was reciting something. “You ask who the figure of cloud was. The truth is that I do not know. Both of us have been torn from the place we should be only to be reborn from the ashes.” His words were undercut by the music still playing in the background. _I rode a tank, held a general’s rank, when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank_.

“Why are you telling me this? What do you get out of it? Telling someone who’s practically purpose built to be used against you what they are seems… kinda suicidal. Don’t think that someone who crawled into a baby’s mind and drove him mad is the sort of person who wants to go full on toaster bath.”

“We are both ghosts. _Geist_. You know this word? It is spirit, mind, spectre, essence. The thing that is left behind when you subtract everything else. People said to you that _du warst geisteskrank_, that there was something crooked in your mind. There was a time, long, long ago, when I too thought that there was something broken in my mind. No one can have power like us and not crack.”

“Oh come on. Really? You’re really going to go with the whole ‘we’re the same, you and I’ shtick? That’s basically the oldest ploy around. What’s next, you’re going to say that we can rule together, King and Queen of Shadows? Nuh uh. Give me back David, and then you can head back to some creepy dark spot somewhere.”

“No. Every animal wants to live. David is mine. My child. My beautiful baby boy. I care for him. When he tried to hang himself, I destroyed the cord. When the earth opened up and swallowed him, I brought him to safety.”

“Okay. That’s, like, way twisted. You’ve got him squirreled away in Wonderland while you break the world. You said that he was threatened by you – I guess that means that _you_ don’t think that you’re a threat. It’s something that you do, but it isn’t something that you are. He sees you as a threat, but you don’t think you are. Or something. Whatever. Point is that that is some seriously unhealthy thinking, man. Like, gaslighting stuff. Yeah.” Buffy trailed off uncertainly for a moment before rallying. “Point is, that stops now.”

She walked over the second, empty swing. She reached out, feeling for something, found it. There was a shimmer in the air, like a heat haze, and then David was sitting there. Though his eyes were open, they were blank and focused on nothing. He swung mechanically, seemingly without being aware of what he was doing. Buffy gripped his shoulders. “Come on, David. Be with me.” There was a pressure in her head, like something was trying to get out, but Buffy ignored it. She just focused on David. 

As she spoke, the music became almost deafeningly loud, as though it was trying to drown out her words.

_Have some sympathy, and some taste,  
Use all your well-learned politesse  
Or I’ll lay your soul to waste, oh yeah_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note: I don’t own the song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. I do, however, take full responsibility for changing one of the lines to ‘Who killed Kennedy?’.
> 
> Canonically, Farouk speaks English, Farsi, French and German. I speak English, and I’m reasonably conversant in French, but I don’t speak German at all. What I’ve used here is the result of some time spent with a dictionary. If there’s any errors, please let me know. I decided not to even attempt Farsi because I’m sure I’d butcher it. That said, it may be of interest to note that _geist_ is a cognate with the Farsi zešt, meaning ‘ugly’ or ‘hateful’.
> 
> The word that Farouk uses for Slayer, _Jägerin_, is probably more accurately translated as ‘huntress’. I used that because it has the closest connotations to Slayer as used in the show of any word I could find. However, when he says that Buffy isn’t someone who slays, he uses there is _emordet_, from _ermorden_, meaning ‘to murder’. I chose that because of the juxtaposition between a Slayer and a killer that sometimes cropped up in the show. 
> 
> When Farouk confuses Buffy by talking about the difference between a world which doesn’t exist and one which is not yet born, that happens because the words _n’être_ (to not be/not to be) and _naître_ (to be born) are homophones in French. There was some research done in France which showed that when people diagnosed with schizophrenia were asked what the opposite of ‘to die’ (_mourir_) was, they responded with _n’être_ and various synonyms like ‘to vanish’ or ‘to disappear’ rather than with _naître_. Not that that’s particularly relevant, but I thought it was interesting.


	38. Chapter Thirty-Eight

Suddenly Buffy realised that she’d stopped paying attention. As much as she liked Doctor Gregory, biology was never going to be something that gripped her. Sometimes she drifted away. She’d been day-dreaming.

She tried to remember what she’d been thinking about. She felt like it had been important, _vital_, but it had slipped away from her somehow.

“What do you remember?” Gregory snapped. For a moment she thought that he was talking directly to her, that he’d somehow reached into her head and read her thoughts, but then she realised that he was just continuing his class. The Bunsen burner on the desk in front of him flickered and danced, the firelight reflecting from his glasses. Buffy frowned. Why would there be a Bunsen burner in a biology class? What had she missed?

Gregory began to stroll down the aisles. “I’m not asking what you remember from the preparatory readings for this class. I’d be surprised if any of you, other than Miss Rosenberg over there, has even done it.” He jerked his head in Willow’s direction. The other girl’s head was bent over her books, her hair obscuring her face as she tried to make herself as innocuous as possible. “No, my question is broader than that. I’m asking what you remember in general.” He raised a knowing eyebrow at Buffy. In that moment, she knew that he knew that she hadn’t been paying attention. “Miss Summers?”

“Uh… the past?” The class tittered.

“No, no. Don’t laugh. The answer’s a little basic, yes, but the idea is sound. You remember the past. Of course you do. What else would you remember?” Gregory leant on Buffy’s desk. The light caught his glasses and turned them into opaque mirrors. “We remember the past, and we forget the past. But let us hypothesise-“ he whirled around and strode back to the blackboard, “-that there exists someone who remembers everything. Every second. Every moment. Every little thing, flawlessly. Let us call him… Ptonomy.” He began to scrawl _Ptonomy_ on the board.

Buffy sat up. The name was almost physically painful. She recognised it, she was _sure_ she did, but she couldn’t remember _how_. The memory hovered just beyond reach. 

“When this person remembers something, he remembers it fully. What it felt like, what it sounded like, how he felt. His memory is not coloured by his present. When he fights, he remembers what it’s like to be hit in the face. He _feels_ it. Usually people can’t remember pain, the actual, physical sensation. Just the emotions that come with it. But our hypothetical man remembers everything. For him, the past is solid; when he remembers, he is totally in the past, free and clear. When we remember something, we do so in the first person plural – we _are_ we, past-I and present-I inextricably merged. Not so for Ptonomy. When he is in the past, he is the first person singular. In the past, he says _I_, because in the past he is only himself.”

The door to the classroom creaked open. Gregory didn’t seem to notice. Miss French came in. She was beautiful, as always. Buffy knew without having to look that at least half the class had stopped paying attention to Gregory. They were far more interested in watching Miss French walk. For her part, she wasn’t paying any attention to the class – she didn’t seem to even be aware that there was anyone else there. She just stalked towards Doctor Gregory, every slow and deliberate footstep _screaming_ predator.

Buffy surged to her feet. She remembered this. This was bad. Something bad was going to happen. She had to stop it. She had to. It was what she did. What she was. (What was she?) She began running down the aisle, but she was moving slowly, so very slowly. It was like the air had become thick, almost solid. She felt like she was drowning. She opened her mouth to scream – whether as a warning or a cry for help, she wasn’t sure – but nothing came out. Gregory still had his back to the class, and everyone else was so entranced by Miss French that they hadn’t even noticed Buffy. In a room full of people, Buffy was completely and utterly alone.

“Let us imagine someone else. A storyteller. His name is irrelevant – no one is interested in the storyteller when there’s a story to tell. This particular storyteller tells stories from a dead world. He weaves his stories with all of the skill of a spider’s masterpiece. He weaves them so deftly that you begin to think that they are your own memories. You become attached to these people who are dead and gone and burned. You think they’re with you. But some part of you, deep and forgotten, recognises these memories for what they are – stories. Fictions. Nothing more, nothing less. Things that have been forced into you. Things that have taken you away from the real world, leaving you with a world as solid as a cloud. When you’re in _these_ memories, they’re in the second person. Some subconscious part of you recognises that they’ve been told to you, and so you hold them at arm’s length. You cordon them off and call them insanity.” Gregory turned around. The light from the burner glittered on his glasses. He smiled widely. “Well, Buffy? What do you think of that?”

“_Look out_!” Buffy screamed, but she was too late. Miss French raised her arms, and suddenly she wasn’t human anymore, her arms were claws. She reached out and there was a small, quiet sound that nevertheless filled the room. Just a quiet _snick_, and then Gregory’s head rolled onto the floor.

His body didn’t fall. It stood there, swaying gently. From the gaping hole where his head should have been oozed not blood but some sort of deep, inky black oily substance. 

Buffy stood and stared.

Miss French – the bug thing that had been Miss French – turned to face Buffy. “Go!” Her voice hissed and popped in ways that no human’s ever did. “You have to find David. He’ll try to trick you, try to keep you apart, but you’ve got to be strong. We’ll help you if we can.”

Buffy stood and stared.

“Slayer! Go!”

The word _Slayer_ echoed and bounced in Buffy’s mind. As though the word had been some kind of key, it unlocked memories that had been sealed away inside her. Memories roiled inside her skull. For a moment she felt an unbearable pressure, as though there was something inside her that was trying to get out, but she fought it down. She was the Slayer. Fighting was what she did.

In the distance she heard an explosion, screams, breaking glass, _laughter_. She knew instinctively that David was there. She raced out of the room.

Behind her, Gregory’s body collapsed, and the deep, inky black oily substance began slithering after her.

She ran through the halls, trying to work out where all the noise was coming from. She didn’t recognise the corridors – this wasn’t Sunnydale High, wasn’t Hemery, wasn’t anywhere that she knew – but it didn’t matter. She had to find David and get them out.

As she pelted around a corner, Buffy collided with someone. Buffy bounced off and sprawled on the floor, while the person that she’d crashed into didn’t move at all. She might as well have run into a wall.

The figure was dressed like pretty much every security guard that Buffy had ever seen, apart from a bright red scarf wrapped around her neck. “Well well well,” Chrissy said, her eyes sparkling with malice. “Looks like someone’s out of class when they shouldn’t be. And running in the halls to boot. What _will_ the Principal say?” She bent at the waist and seized Buffy’s wrist in a grip of iron. It wasn’t that she was being gripped tightly, but she couldn’t shift the other woman’s grip at all. 

Nevertheless, Buffy tried to pull away. “Let me _go_.”

“I don’t think so. You’re in trouble, Missy.” She began dragging Buffy down the hall, completely unfazed by her struggles. “It’s the Principal’s office for you.”

“You know you _don’t_-“ Buffy stomped on Chrissy’s foot. As the other woman hunched slightly, she drove her knee upwards into Chrissy’s abdomen, while simultaneously slamming the elbow of her free arm into her back. Chrissy gasped as the air was driven out of her, and her grip on Buffy weakened enough for her to pull free. “-have to pretend that I’m just some student or something. We both know what I am.”

“_Mutant_,” Chrissy spat. She straightened as she began to recover from Buffy’s attack.

“Sure,” Buffy agreed, “but the big thing, the thing that should really be worrying you right now?” Buffy skipped forwards, using the momentum to power a high kick towards Chrissy’s chin. Never in a million years would she be able to pull off a manoeuvre like that in the real world – she just wasn’t physically capable – but she knew how to do it. She had years and years of memories of training to do stuff like that. Her body had never been able to keep up before. But here, in this place, her body didn’t matter. “I’m the _Slayer_.”

Chrissy leant backwards, avoiding Buffy’s kick. Her hands shot out and grabbed Buffy’s leg, forcing it higher so that Buffy was off-balance. Buffy used the momentum to spin and drive a kick into Chrissy’s side. She grunted at the impact but didn’t let go. “You’re nothing but a prison. You know that, right? You were pulled from your burning world, then you were purpose-built to hold him. The powerful thing buried beneath your thoughts. The one that’s going to suck the world into fiery oblivion.” Chrissy stepped close to Buffy, forcing the smaller woman to hop as her leg was forced higher. She tried to trip Buffy by forcing her over her hip, but Buffy used it as springboard to hurl herself backwards, tearing herself free. Instantly Buffy settled into a fighting stance. “You’re going to _burn_. He’s going to incinerate you from the inside out. You’ll burn, just like your friends did.”

Chrissy leapt forward with a wild haymaker but, when Buffy moved to block, the strike suddenly turned into a serious of lightning fast jabs into Buffy’s chest. Buffy tried to sway out of the way, but she wasn’t quite fast enough. One blow hit her in the shoulder, deadening her arm and sending her spinning. She tried to move away so that Chrissy wouldn’t get a chance to follow up, but a foot caught her hip and suddenly she wasn’t moving like she’d planned. Buffy stumbled and tried to right herself, but there was another kick to the back of her knee. She buckled and would have fallen, but Chrissy grabbed her hair and yanked her backwards. Buffy slammed her elbow backwards and caught Chrissy full in the ribs, but it was like hitting a wall. Something soft looped around Buffy’s neck and then _tightened_. Chrissy was strangling her with her scarf.

“You’re nothing,” Chrissy hissed in her ear. Buffy flinched as spittle spattered her face. “Just something that’s been made. That’s all you’ve ever been. A thing that’s been created by the darkness coiled around your soul. Slayer or mutant – it’s all the same. It’s nothing in the end.”

Buffy tried to loop her fingers under the scarf and get loose, but she couldn’t seem to find any purchase. The fabric was slick and seemed to actively avoid her grip. When Buffy looked down she saw that her hands were covered in some kind of black fluid, darker than night. Her vision became murky – for a moment she thought that they were slipping into the world that was cloud again, but then she realised that she was just being choked to death. She tried to struggle but her limbs felt _so_ heavy, and her heart was beating so hard that every motion was jerky and uncoordinated anyway. Her throat was burning, her head was throbbing, everything was going dark. She realised in that moment that she was going to die, and that she wasn’t going to get a chance to see the sun again. She missed it. How warm it had been on her skin. Nothing like the fire encircling her throat. The sky had been so blue...

Dimly, as though from a great distance, Buffy heard a thud. Suddenly the terrible fiery cord around her neck loosened. Buffy fell onto her hands and knees and coughed, feeling as though someone had stuffed her throat with sandpaper. Chrissy was a dead weight, forcing her downwards. When Buffy felt like there was some actual air in her lungs and as though the world had stopped spinning, she pushed her off. Chrissy collapsed limply onto the floor next to her.

Buffy looked up through bleary eyes to see a figure standing over her. She couldn’t make out any details other than the fact that the figure had an axe in one hand. Buffy tried to prepare herself for what she was sure was some kind of new threat. She had plenty of people in her head that would like to kill her, and they’d happily take out anyone who looked like they were going to get there first.

The figure crouched and extended a hand. “Hey there, sweetie. Everything’s okay now.”

Buffy blinked. She knew that voice. She knew it as much as she did her own. She scrubbed at her eyes and then looked up at the figure that had suddenly sprung into focus. “Mom?”


	39. Chapter Thirty-Nine

“Are you-“ Buffy began, but the rest of the question died unsaid before it could be spoken. The word ‘real’ tasted like ashes on her tongue. The sensible thing to do would be to ask Joyce if she was actually there, and even one day ago Buffy would have asked just that. But she didn’t. Not because it didn’t matter one way or another whether this was really her mom, or just a ghost from a dead world – in fact, it was just the opposite. She wanted to go home so hard that it hurt, more than her bruised neck or her throbbing head. She wanted to go home. 

She wanted her mom. She didn’t dare ask her if she was real. One wrong answer and she’d shatter like glass. So she didn’t ask. Neither did she reach out to touch her, even though she was curved towards her like a tree reaching for the sun. Although the hunger to touch and hold felt like she was being hollowed out from within, she couldn’t bear to reach out and find something as insubstantial as air.

“Hey, Mom,” she said instead. Her voice didn’t shake, because she wouldn’t let it.

“Hi.” It made Buffy feel better to see that Joyce seemed to be as insecure as she felt. As she looked, though, she realised that this wasn’t the same Joyce that she’d left back in Summerland. She wasn’t showing any after-effects of her time in Division Three – in fact, she looked younger than she had for years. The last time she’d seen Joyce look like this, Buffy had been a teenager. “We should really get going before she wakes up.” Joyce gestured with her axe at Chrissy’s body. She was lying in a puddle of black liquid, darker than night. It was seeping out from beneath the scarf wrapped around her neck.

“Okay,” Buffy said dully. She walked forward. She didn’t know where she was going. She knew that David was out there somewhere, but she couldn’t hear him anymore. Whatever this school was, she didn’t know it. She didn’t have any idea where he might be. The best that she could do would be to strike out blindly. So she walked. Though she heard Joyce walk beside her, she didn’t turn to look at her. It was easier to be alone, even if there was someone else there. It hurt less.

Even so, she could feel Joyce’s eyes on her. “Are you okay?” Joyce said eventually.

Buffy shrugged, the movement setting off a dull wave of pain from the shoulder that Chrissy had struck. “You know me. I get knocked down, but I get up again. A few bruises aren’t gonna stop me.”

Joyce nodded once. “Right. Good.” A pause. “You know I wasn’t talking about that, right? How are _you_?”

Buffy would have liked to say something clever, something funny – the sort of thing that would get a high five from Xander and an eye roll from Willow. Instead, her response tripped past her lips without any conscious thought. “_Bad_.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie. You’ve got to be strong.”

Buffy whirled around. “Why? What does that mean? I don’t know if you noticed, but the Shadow King just did a whole bit where he said that he put all my memories in my head. That they aren’t really mine. I remember you, you know. I miss you. More than my real mom. And like, that feels like all of the bad to say, but - but all of that is just a story he spun in my head. The person I love is a ghost.”

Though Buffy’s voice was harsh and hard, dripping with anger and grief, Joyce just looked at her. “Why do you think he did it?”

“I don’t know! He stole the sky! He made a palm tree grow fingers! Who knows why he does things? Maybe no one can have power like that and not be totally and completely nutso. How am I supposed to know? Who knows why someone like that does anything?”

“What would happen, right now, if you didn’t have those memories? If you’d never had them? I’d just be some… thing. A thing that looks like your mom. I’d be nothing at all. Not even a ghost. But I’m not. You look at me and you see _me_, not some pale imitation of your mom.” Joyce took a deep breath. A cynical, hard part of Buffy wondered why it was necessary – surely Joyce wasn’t solid, there was no need for her to breathe. “Buffy, he put those memories in your head so that this would be more difficult for you.”

“So what would be difficult? Finding David? That’s already super-”

“No. The bit that comes after that,” Joyce said sadly. “The part where you let us go.”

“I – what? I don’t get it.”

“You’re a prison, Buffy. A prison designed to hold a dead man with the power of a god. A prison so empty and vast that even if he howls with all the force of a hurricane, he won’t even touch the sides. But you aren’t empty. You’ve got a whole world in your head, and more things keep pouring in. Chrissy. All the Division Three soldiers the Bringers killed. Lenny. Everyone at Clockworks. You can’t tell the difference. They’re all dead, and they just… slip in. You’re at capacity. Things are leaking.”

“That’s what Caleb said. Is that how Walter tracked me? Did he follow, I don’t know, psychic energy stuff or-“ Buffy stopped walking. “No. That’s not it, is it? He didn’t track energy. He tracked _you_. All of you. When I told Angel what Caleb said, he said ‘We’re here’. I thought he was just talking about having a dead world in my head, but that’s not it, is it? I shouldn’t be seeing you at all. You shouldn’t be out and about. You should be… buried somewhere inside my head. Like Farouk should be.” 

Joyce took her hand. Buffy stared down at it in shock. She could feel it. It was warm, soft, _solid_. “Buffy,” Joyce said gently, “we shouldn’t be anywhere at all.”

“What?”

“We’re dead. You know what happens when you’re dead. You know it better than anyone. You know what it’s like to have been dead and then be pulled back. To be a prisoner in your own skin. To put on a brave face so that everyone you love doesn’t see the great, aching emptiness in your heart.” Though Joyce’s voice was steady, it wasn’t calm. There was no emotion in it at all. It was flat and empty, the voice of someone feeling far, far more than they could ever express. “So there’s that, and then there’s… him. The devil with the yellow eyes. He rages constantly, like a lion roaring at its cage. That power, that _darkness_ has oozed into every corner of your mind. We’re drowning, Buffy. He can’t kill us, but he’s leaving us suspended in a dark ocean, drowning constantly. You felt the edges of it, I think, with Caleb. There isn’t room for all of us. You have to let us go.”

“How? How can I – I can’t. I can’t do that.” Buffy wasn’t sure if she was saying that it was something she was actually unable to do, or if it was something that she couldn’t bring herself to do. She’d lost them before. She’d failed them before. She hadn’t been able to stop her world from dying. But here Joyce was, her hand in hers, telling her that she wanted to die. How could she let her go again? _How?_

“You need to find David.”

“Parasite Man has him wrapped around his finger. Even if I find him, what he’s supposed to do? He doesn’t know what he can do himself!”

“If the world’s on fire, and you can only save one thing, what do you save?”

Before Buffy could even begin to be annoyed by yet more cryptic gibberish, Joyce froze. Literally froze. Her hair was stiff with frost. Her lips were blue, and there was even a veneer of ice obscuring her eyes. She radiated cold. Buffy’s felt pins and needles in her hand where Joyce was holding it. With some difficulty she managed to pry herself free. She massaged her hand, trying to warm it up.

“Do you believe her?”

Buffy’s head snapped upwards. A moment earlier there had been nothing in front of her but an empty hallway, but now there was a deckchair. Farouk was lounging on it, hands folded behind his head. In his immaculate suit, he looked like a businessman snatching a moment from a busy schedule to relax in the sun. “Why shouldn’t I believe her?”

“I’ve never hurt you. I’ve kept you safe, where I could. I saved you when Clockworks fell. When the soldiers shot you.”

“It’s not me that you’re hurting though, is it? You’ve been torturing a whole world.”

“Have I? They’re ghosts. _Les revenants_, those which return. If they do not enjoy the place that they’ve returned to, that has nothing to do with me. I didn’t kill them. I didn’t make their prison.”

“You’re the one poisoning it. The bad guy.”

“Ah, yes. They always say that. Because I have power, I must be evil. That is the song that Division Three sings. They hunt you because they think you can break the world. It doesn’t matter to them that you don’t want to. It’s enough that you can. I do not want to harm anyone. I want to live. Simply that.”

“Yeah? Then why’d you steal the sky? Why make some totally wacked out maze? Why do _any_ of this stuff? If you just want to live, why not just come out and say it?”

“You hear too much already. You and David both. He cannot stay in his own head. All the time, he drifts and finds minds screaming at him. You have your ghosts. One more voice gets lost in the cacophony. It’s taken this long for you to get to the point where you’re able to listen.”

“You know, what you’re saying sounds like something that makes sense. If you squint. Or, like, squint with your ears, I guess, or – whatever. But then there’s the fact that Chrissy just tried to strangle me, and she was bleeding this… stuff. The same stuff that follows you wherever you go. You looked like a devil. Sure, you’ll probably say that David saw you as a threat and that’s what a threat looks like to a little boy, but I don’t buy it. If you know that his head is all twisted because no one can have power like that and not crack – and you can’t tell me that you, Mister Mind Parasite Man, didn’t know - then it would have been better to wait. He wasn’t ready to see you. In the church, in Caleb’s memory, I felt like there was something in my head that was forcing its way out. It wasn’t all the ghosts. It was you. You’d have split me in half if it would set you free. And I know, I _know_, that you’ll have some sort of reasonable explanation. But I won’t believe it. I’ve spent enough time clinging to stuff that sounds reasonable, that sounds _right_. It never is. I’ve had enough of gaslighting. Turns out that the world doesn't make a lot of sense.” She looked over at Joyce. “It’s time to let it go.”

She opened the door next to her. It had been there all along, just like all the other doors that led off the hallway. There was nothing to distinguish it from any of the others. It could have been empty. But it wasn’t. She wouldn’t let it be. This was the room with David in it. She was sure. She knew it. So when she opened it, filled with certainty, she found exactly what she knew she’d find. It didn’t matter that it shouldn’t have been the right room. 

It was a school chemistry lab. There were beakers and Bunsen burners everywhere, a gigantic poster of the periodic table taking up most of one wall. There were young students in their early teens, and a teacher. Buffy didn’t recognise any of them. All of them were still, motionless in a silent tableau. Her eye was drawn to one boy. His eyes were wide, his hands spread and his fingers hooked into claws. His mouth was open in a silent scream. Something in front of him was on fire, and the table was covered in broken glass. David. It had to be.

She moved towards him. At the same time, the room became unfrozen. There were gasps, screams, even a few startled, manic laughs. The teacher moved towards David. Her face told Buffy that this wasn’t the first time that something like this had happened. David, however, didn’t seem to notice any of that. His mouth hung open, but no sound came out. He looked like a boy trapped in a nightmare.

Buffy ran towards him. The air was thick like treacle, slowing her down, but she kept moving. She had to reach him before the teacher did. Otherwise he’d be taken away somewhere, and she’d never be able to find him again. She ran, pushing her way past the other students, vaulting over workbenches and shoving beakers and burners aside. Glass cut her hands and flames scorched her skin, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting to David.

She just barely made it ahead of the teacher. She grabbed him by the shoulders. “David. Wake up. This is a dream. Kinda. We need to get out of here. David!”

David flickered in place. He became a porcupine, spines stabbing Buffy’s hands like knives – a burning coal, white with heat – a slippery octopus, writhing as it tried to free itself.

Then suddenly he was Dawn, and Buffy’s hands were around her throat, throttling her. Dawn didn’t fight or struggle. She just looked at Buffy with a look of deep, aching betrayal in eyes that were luminous with tears. 

Buffy’s hands loosened instinctively. She couldn’t kill Dawn. She had to let go. 

_You have to let us go._

“I’m sorry, Dawnie,” Buffy said thickly. “I’m so sorry.” She held on. She had to. Even though she felt as though something within her had curled up and died, she held on.

Then he was David again. Adult David. The David that Buffy knew. He looked like someone coming out of a dream. He reached up and took hold of Buffy’s hands. “Thank you for bringing me back.”

“David, we need to-“

The door to the room slammed open. With a blaring sound that was a bit like a screeching trumpet and a bit like a screaming nightmare and not really like either, the devil with the yellow eyes rolled into the room like an oil spill. It raised a hand, and Buffy felt pressure building in her head. With a mouth that suddenly had a mind of its own and wanted to do nothing more than bite through her tongue and chew her cheeks to pieces, Buffy managed to spit out a few words. “Inferno. Let go. A pyre. David. Help.”

David looked at her, baffled. She felt something cut through her mind like a searchlight. David’s face lit with understanding. He reached out his hands to the sides of Buffy’s head.

Shards of broken glass leapt up from the table to form manacles around his wrists, snapping them back down to his sides. Blood from the fractured glass spilled down his hands and dripped onto the ground. Slowly, inexorably, he was being dragged away.

Buffy knew that she should fight, that she should reach out to him, but her hands wouldn’t obey her. Every impulse was swamped by the pressure in her head. Every order to her muscles was drowned out by voices whispering just out of earshot. She couldn’t make out whose voices they were, or what they were saying. She got the distinct impression that she didn’t want to. She couldn’t move. All she could do was watch David’s futile struggle as he tried to resist being pulled away. All she could do was dread.

And then, suddenly, she _could_ understand what the voices were saying. The words hit her like a tidal wave. Hundreds, thousands of voices all speaking at once. Buffy was able to catch a few words-

_Are you ready to be strong/Tell my mother I’m sorry/Can’t hurt me anymore/Are you ready to be strong/Five by five/I live in the action of death/Are you ready to be strong_

-but mainly she felt like she’d been pounded into the ground by a hammer the size of a world. The force of the voices slamming into her mind was so extreme that she wasn’t sure how she was still alive. Her bones should have been ground to dust. She should have been pulverised. There was no way that something as small as she was could survive something like that. 

She screamed. Her voice was definitely there, thin and weak, but it was swamped by so many other voices. So many primal screams.

David slid backwards, hair whipping around as though he was in a heavy gale. He crouched, bracing himself against the force of the scream. The glass manacles shattered. The teacher and the students disintegrated, swirling through the air like ash in a tornado.

The devil with the yellow eyes was struck by something like the hammer of God. Well, the hammer of something, at least. It bent in half from the force of the scream and rocketed backwards out of the room.

Then the door slammed, and suddenly everything was silent. Buffy slumped over. She would have fallen if she hadn’t caught herself on a table. Her throat felt torn and ragged. She tasted blood. Her mind was filled with Slayers, shouting and clamouring.

David came to stand in front of her. Buffy stared at him dumbly. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t breathe. 

“We don’t have much time,” David said quickly. “It’ll be back soon. Are you ready?”

_Are you ready to be strong?_

“I’ll take that as a yes,” David said. He held Buffy’s head and closed his eyes, and suddenly her mind was filled with fire. There was an inferno roaring away inside her skull. A sun had burst into life inside her head, and it was scorching her. She was burning away. She was being hollowed out. Her mind was a gigantic pyre.

One by one, the voices faded away. Others spoke in their place, and then they too were silent.

_Goodbye.  
Live long and prosper.  
I’m so proud of you, sweetie.  
See you on the other side, B.  
Goodbye.  
See you later, alligator.  
I love you.  
Goodbye.  
Goodbye.  
See you around.  
Love ya.  
Goodbye._


	40. Chapter Forty

It was later. Things have happened. The problem was, though, that most people weren’t sure what exactly those things were. Most things didn’t make sense, or only made sense if you were on hard drugs. People had questions.

David answered most of them. Being able to read minds meant that he had more of a complete picture of the last week than just about anyone else.

So he told a story. The story began with a battle that happened decades ago, between an Englishman and a man that called himself the Shadow King. The Shadow King lost, and he ran away. In a desperate struggle to stay alive, he wormed his way into the mind of a baby boy called David. Sometime later David had grown up and had realised that the name of the sickness that had plagued him for most of his life wasn’t schizophrenia – it was Amahl Farouk. He had scoured the universe for someone who could help him fight the shadow in his own mind. He’d found someone. One girl in all the world – not this world, you understand – who was destined to fight the forces of darkness. The Slayer. Buffy. In his desperate struggle to stay alive, he’d burned down her world and pulled her into this one. But Buffy, seeing her world on fire, had saved the only thing that she could. _Everything_. She’d brought her world with her. 

Unfortunately, in saving this dead world, she’d saved something else. A dead man. A ghost that had wormed its way into the mind of a little boy. She couldn’t tell the difference. Death was her gift. Her mind was filled with ghosts. One more slipped in without noticing.

But Farouk didn’t want to be buried alongside the dead world. He’d clung to David’s mind like a moth to a flame. In his desperate struggle to stay alive, he’d twisted both their minds. Slowly, insidiously, he began to twist David into the kind of person who would kill a world if it meant that he could survive. He tried to make David into the other that was himself, so that one day David would look in a mirror and see only the face of the person that he’d dedicated his life to fighting. He tried to make Buffy into the Slayer, someone from another world. Someone as inconsequential as the ghosts that echoed in the great emptiness that was her mind.

They realised that he was there. A great spider that had woven itself into the fabric of their lives. By twisting everything they saw or felt or _thought_, he’d made them believe the stories that he spun for them. He’d gaslighted them until they believed that they were nothing more than sick. 

But he wasn’t the only thing in Buffy’s head. Things leaked out. Just as Farouk oozed and slithered into every corner of her mind like a black liquid, darker than night, so too did others. They knew what they were. They knew that they should be dead and gone, as should Farouk.

When the world is on fire, you shouldn’t save anything at all. So Buffy had reached out to David. The boy whose mind was like an inferno. The World Killer. For the second time, he’d killed Buffy’s world. He’d burst into her mind like a supernova and exorcised her ghosts. Then Farouk had been trapped in a mind designed to hold a whole world. He could rant and rave and rage, but Buffy was empty. He was trapped in a mind like the depths of space or the bottom of the ocean. He couldn’t hurt anyone else.

That was the story that unfolded after many long hours of discussion and questions.

Some of those questions were directed towards Buffy. She was, after all, an integral part of the story.

Many of them were intercepted by David. Maybe it was because he had the answers. Maybe it was because he knew something of the turmoil going on inside her, and thought that it would better if she wasn’t forced to relive recent events. Maybe it was because Joyce was there, looking increasingly wretched as all of this came to light, and he wanted to spare her having to listen to her daughter say something that she didn’t want to hear.

But he didn’t answer everything. He couldn’t. There are only so many things that a single person can know, even if they’re psychic. On those occasions, Buffy spoke as though the words were being winched out of some deep reservoir inside her. Words were carefully marshalled on her tongue. Though she always answered promptly, she always used as few words as possible. She didn’t volunteer information. She spoke in a dull monotone without looking at the person that she was talking to. She didn’t raise her eyes from her hands folded neatly in front of her. Although she always answered, there was nevertheless a sense that she wasn’t really there. That she was somewhere far, far away.

After a while, people stopped asking her questions. Maybe because she made them feel uncomfortable. Maybe because they didn’t want to pull her back from whatever corner of her mind to which she’d retreated.

Truthfully, though, she didn’t feel like there was enough left of her to be anywhere at all. There was only a great, yawning emptiness inside of her. She felt like, if someone sliced her open, they wouldn’t see flesh and blood. They’d see the darkness between the stars. A vacuum. She stared at her hands because she couldn’t really believe that they were hers. If they were hers, then she wouldn’t have let go. They wouldn’t be folded neatly in front of her. They wouldn’t be empty. They should be torn and bloody from holding on. Instead, she felt like she was falling and there was nothing to catch her fall.

So she sat, her mind constantly dwelling on the hollowness where her soul should be. 

When everything was over and everyone had a story that answered at least some of their questions, they got up and left. Ptonomy put a hand on her shoulder before he walked out in a show of silent support. There was no indication that she noticed. Joyce stayed for a while. Her mouth worked silently. She looked like she would have liked to say something, but she what could she say? She’d never known how to speak to her daughter – she’d avoided her for years because of that. She hadn’t known then and she definitely didn’t know now. Eventually, she too got up and left.

After some time, Buffy looked out of the window. She didn’t look at the grass or the trees swaying in the wind. She looked at the sky. She was surprised that it was there. That it was bright and blue and normal. That the sun was shining. It felt so warm on her skin.

She remembered the way that Drusilla had sounded, when she’d said that she would never touch or hold or kiss again. She’d felt like that once before, when she’d died and been brought back inside a coffin six feet underground. She’d thought that she couldn’t possibly do anything as normal as any of that. Not when she felt like there was something dead inside of her. She’d been dead, and then she’d been alive again, but something hadn’t come back. Something vital, in all senses of the word.

She didn’t feel like that now. There was nothing inside her at all, dead or otherwise. In that moment, she understood why someone might steal the sky and leave nothing but empty space in its place. Farouk had been a hollow god, trying to make the world in his own image.

She’d never see any of them again. 

She couldn’t stay in Summerland. Not while David was there. Although she could understand why he’d done what he’d done – even though she could understand it so clearly that it _hurt_ \- there was simply no way that she could stay in the same place as the man that had killed her world twice. She would never be able to look at him and see anything other than a murderer. It didn’t matter that there were others here, others who cared for her. Given time, she knew, they’d make her live again. She’d had friends who’d done that once before. But they were dead too, now. She’d been wrong when she’d thought that it hurt less to be alone even when there was someone else there. It was worse. So much worse. Eventually they really _wouldn’t_ be there, and when they leave they take a chunk of you with them. Eventually there’s nothing left, and you’re empty.

No. It was better to leave. 

She stood. She knew where the cars were kept. No one would notice she was gone until she’d already left. Summerland was almost empty as it was, and the few people that were left were being so careful to leave her alone with her grief.

She wondered briefly if David knew what she was doing. Probably, she reflected. She doubted that he’d even need to read her mind to work it out. They knew each other, World Killer and World Killed. Looking at David would be like looking in a mirror (she’ll never be able to look at her hands without seeing them wrapped around Dawn’s throat).

She walked. Her footsteps weren’t slow or deliberate. They were shaky, and one short step away from a run. She had to leave. She had to be somewhere else. Maybe, once she was there, she’d feel better. Maybe. She could hope. She couldn’t do anything else.

She walked into the garage. She moved over to the rack on the wall where all the car keys hung. There were less than there had been last time she’d been here, when she’d headed off with Rudy to rescue David. Almost everyone had left since then. She picked a key at random, turned around and hesitated.

Technically, she could drive. She had memories – or rather, she’d been told stories in which she’d driven. She’d never really done it in real life. She felt the weight of the key in her hand. She tossed it into the air and watched as it glittered and sparkled in the sun before catching it again.

Her lips curved into something that wasn’t a smile in the same way that a painting of a pipe isn’t a pipe. She threw the key again – not straight up, but away from her.

Someone caught it.

“So,” Lenny said, grinning. “You got any place in mind?”

Buffy shrugged. It didn’t matter. Everywhere she’d like to go had burned along with the rest of her world. “It’s your world.”

“Right then. Drifting like a leaf on the wind it is.”

Buffy slid into the passenger seat as Lenny started up the engine. She rolled down the window. The wind whipped through her hair and whispered something to her that she couldn’t quite catch. She closed her eyes and felt the warmth of the sun on her skin. Maybe someday, if they travelled far enough, she wouldn’t feel like her insides were frozen lumps of ice. 

~*~

There is a place. It seems to be made entirely out of barren rock and scorched earth. There is no bird song. There are no birds. There’s nothing at all – at least, nothing alive. Even the wind has died long ago. The air is stagnant, sterile, and filled with ash.

Look closer. Amongst the ash and the dust there are things that were people, once. Now they are barely even recognisable as fire-blasted skeletons.

Look closer. Burrow beneath the earth and, in so doing, reveal it to not be earth at all. There is no soil here. There is nothing but flame-blackened bones piled upon each other. This is a mass grave, big enough for a world.

Look closer. Buried under mountains of corpses there is a coffin. It’s a simple wooden thing, but even so, it’s the only thing that hasn’t been touched by fire. It stands out like a flower in a furnace.

Look closer. Look inside. See the thing that hammers against the lid of the coffin. It isn’t human. Its arms are long and spindly, and its fingers are freakishly long. It scratches and scrabbles as though it actually believes that it can shift all the corpses pushing down on it, weighing it down. It hopes that it can escape, even though it knows exactly what’s keeping it in place.

You do too. You’ve seen everything. You know that it can’t force its way out. Not when there’s a whole world bearing down on it.

The thing turns to face you. Its yellow eyes fix on yours. You see it smile, and suddenly you aren’t so sure. Maybe there _is_ a way out. You’re here, after all. Aren’t you?


End file.
